


Parallax

by ignipes



Series: Parallax [1]
Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy, Panic At The Disco
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-03
Updated: 2009-01-03
Packaged: 2017-10-27 17:18:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 43,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/298180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only thing Jon wanted was a way off this station.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> stele3 wrote a fantastic prequel to this story (here: http://stele3.insanejournal.com/252937.html), but it's probably better to read "Parallax" before reading "The Monsters That We Bear."

**i.**

Jon woke to the sound of banging on the wall outside. It was a series of loud, erratic, metallic clanks, like somebody was rattling a wrench along the pipes lining the corridor. He groaned and rolled over, accidentally shoving Clover off the cot. He ignored her indignant mewl and pulled the threadbare blanket over his head, but the knocking didn't stop.

"Walker, wake the fuck up!"

The voice was muffled by the door, but it was loud enough. He shoved the blanket back and swung his feet to the floor, hissing at the sudden shock of cold. Tom was still asleep on the top bunk, snoring loudly. Clover jumped onto the bed behind him and curled contentedly into the warm spot.

"Oh, sure," Jon mumbled, knuckling the sleep from his eyes and rolling his shoulders. "You two stay in bed, and I'll go murder the person knocking on the door, okay?"

His stomach lurched and his vision swam unpleasantly when he stood up, and he tripped over his trousers as he stumbled to the door. Sickly yellow light and bitterly cold air flooded into the room when he slid it open.

"What."

Siska snorted with laughter. "You look like shit. Stay away from the Doradan moonshine, dude, if you like your internal organs where they are."

Jon leaned in the doorway, yawned, and rubbed his arms briskly against the cold. "You woke me up to tell me that?"

"Hey, if you're gonna be like that—"

"What do you want?"

"Heard you were looking for a little extra work." Siska tossed the wrench from one hand to the other. "There's a ship, an old Alcyone twin-propulsion, limped in last night on spit and a prayer. It's nobody important and we've all got real work to do, but if you're not busy..."

"Nobody important" most likely meant "nobody who could pay enough to make it worthwhile," otherwise William would have dropped the work into one of his guys' laps rather than Jon's. But work was work, and Jon needed the money.

"Sure, okay," he said. He rubbed a hand over his face and the back of his neck. "I'll take a look."

"It's in bay seven," Siska said. "And dude, I think the pilot is a little feral, so if he bites you, make sure you get the doc to give you some meds."

"Sure," Jon said. "Thanks for the warning."

"No problem." Siska turned on his heels and walked away, whistling cheerfully and banging on the walls with his wrench again.

Jon slid the door shut. He fumbled for his clothes and did a cursory sniff to make sure his shirt wasn't too offensive. Clover watched him through one slitted eye. Jon ran a finger over her head before leaning down to tug his toolbox out from under the cot. Tom didn't even stir. Jon hoisted it onto his shoulder and winced. Siska was right about the Doradan moonshine, and the room was blessedly dark and quiet again, but it was too late for him to enjoy it. He opened the door, cast one jealous glance back at the sleeping cat, and stepped into the hallway. He locked the door behind him, both the lock on the door and the one he'd built himself. Clover was the only thing in his bunk worth stealing, but a live animal was worth a hell of a lot. Jon knew better than to trust anybody on the station, even those he might call friends.

The cramped closet of space he and Tom shared was located three levels below the docking bays, in a distal arm of the station far from the reactors in the core. The inertial adjusters of the artificial gravity system went haywire every few days, slamming everybody with a bout of vertigo and nausea. It was always cold, always dark. Zeta Dra was a way station, a stop between one place and another, a six-legged wheel of battered metal rotating in a slow orbit so far from any star there was no sense of day or night.

Jon had lived in worse places. He reminded himself of that whenever he thought about getting reckless.

Down the narrow hallway and up three sets of ladders, his toolbox balanced on his shoulder, and Jon was outside the docking bays. His head was already throbbing and he was tempted to turn around and head right back to bed, curl up under the covers and forget about the work and the much-needed money. But he kept going. He peered through the windows as he passed: ships from all over, in every shape and size, surrounded by men and women and machines loading and unloading cargo, all of it blending together in a ceaseless hum of activity. The more worlds the Alliance invaded, the busier nowhere places like this became. It seemed like every day there were ships Jon had never seen before, speaking languages he'd never heard. But all of them, no matter where they came from, had the same course in mind: away from the Alliance.

"Jon! Jonny Walker, wait." A voice rang from a doorway to his left, and he heard the sound of a chair shoving back. "Hey, man, wait."

Jon sighed and closed his eyes briefly. "What's up, Bill?"

William bent in the doorway, too tall for its low header, and his long arm snaked out to pull Jon into his office. "News, Walker, my good friend. Where the hell have you been?"

"Asleep," Jon said. And before that, drunk, but William could work that part out on his own. Jon set his tools on the edge of William's desk and made a _well, what?_ gesture. "News about what?"

"Haven't you heard? Ill tidings for our humble home." William folded himself onto his desk and flipped Jon's toolbox open. The station was all low ceilings and tight spaces, and William never seemed to fit properly anywhere.

"If I'd heard, I wouldn't be asking," Jon pointed out.

He glanced at William's face but looked away quickly before he met William's eyes. The work was professional and well-hidden, not a trace of the artificiality visible unless you knew where to look, but Jon knew without a doubt that William's eyes weren't strictly organic. Cybernetic enhancements were rare and valuable—and completely, totally illegal, banned by the Alliance in every system, on every planet, an offense punishable by immediate execution. Jon wondered sometimes why William had taken the chance, whether losing his eyes had been terrifying enough to risk dying to get them back, but he preferred not to think about it.

Jon tugged the toolbox just out of William's reach and shut the lid. "What's going on? Did something happen?"

William frowned and pushed his hair back from his face. "A transport came in from Meera yesterday. Strangers. There are always more strangers."

Jon waited.

"The whispers in the corridors say the normal crew got picked up as the cargo was being loaded," William went on after a moment. He looked at Jon steadily, and Jon didn't let himself look away. "Arrested. A squad marched in, rounded them up, marched them out."

Jon took a few measured breaths and swallowed before he said, "The spaceport at Meera?"

"Right next door," William said.

The Meera system was a unimportant backwater a good two weeks away for an ordinary limited-jump transport ship, but it was Zeta Dra's closest neighbor. Jon had never heard of a squad of Alliance soldiers visiting Meera before, much less making arrests.

"Interesting," Jon said. He hoped William heard nothing more than curiosity in his voice. "Hey, Sisky told me there's a boat in seven you want me to—"

"Jonny," William interrupted. He leaned forward suddenly, his hands curled around the edge of his desk. "People are saying it wasn't an ordinary raid. They were looking for something, or somebody particular. If the Alliance is rattling cages around Meera—"

"I haven't heard anything, I promise," Jon said. He picked up his toolbox again. "I'm not trouble, man. I'm just a guy who fixes ships."

William stared at him for a long moment, his cybernetic eyes unblinking. Then he smirked suddenly and smacked Jon's hand aside playfully. "Yeah, sure, and I'm the prophet of Ruta and the last Earthling and the Chancellor's long lost son all wrapped into one. Get down to seven and get that ship out of my bay. Those kids give me the creeps."

"Because they can't pay you?"

"People without money are terrifying," William agreed, shuddering delicately.

There was only one ship in bay seven. It was, as Siska had said, an old Alcyone twin-prop, the kind they'd stop building long before Jon was born. Jon looked over the shell automatically, taking in the spots where the heat shields were scorched with black marks, and a couple of bent panels that probably meant the landing stabilizers either wouldn't come out or wouldn't retract without a fight. The ship was designed to make fast trips over moderate distances and land on planet surfaces, but Jon would be surprised if it could manage either in its current condition without some serious bumps. At least the Alcubierre web seemed to be intact: the spidery network of threads and nodes of oily, black metal inset into every surface of the ship's exterior, subtly warping the space around it, giving the impression the web was either sunk into the ship or rising above, or sometimes both.

The numbers on the side were a Corvus registration, the name typically Corvus in its obscurity: _The World Is A Broken Bone_. Cheery, Jon thought. The ship was long way from home.

Jon walked around the ship slowly. The cargo hatch was open, but he didn't hear anything or see anybody until he had one foot on the gangplank.

"Who are you?"

Jon was leaning down, trying to get a look at the landing gears, and the voice startled him. He straightened up quickly, ducking to one side to avoid hitting his head. "Hi," he said. "Are you the pilot?"

The person at the top of the gangplank—fuck, he really was just a kid—crossed his arms over his chest and glared down at Jon. "What do you want?"

Jon figured that should be obvious, what with the toolbox and everything, but he just said, "Bill sent me down to take a look at your ship. What kind of problems are you having?"

The kid didn't move. "He said he didn't have anybody to spare."

"Yeah, well, I'm the spare for when there are no spares," Jon said. He took another step forward and waited. A foot on the gangplank was one thing, but he knew better than to go aboard another man's ship without permission.

The kid didn't answer right away. It wasn't very bright under the ship, but Jon could see the dark circles under his eyes, the rigid set to his shoulders. He tapped his foot nervously a couple times before he realized he was doing it and stopped abruptly, glanced over his shoulder, looked back at Jon.

Jon tried to look as harmless as possible. "Do you want me to take a look or not? Because if not, I can—"

"The mag drive's fucked up," the kid said. "At least I think it is. We took off all right and once we broke orbit it was—but it doesn't stay fired up, not for more than a day or so, it kept shutting it down and I had to restart every time and the backup systems aren't—"

"Whoa, whoa, okay." Jon held up his free hand. It sounded like once the kid started it might be a while before he stopped. "You made it all the way from Corvus with a fucked up primary drive?"

The kid twitched his shoulders, not exactly a shrug.

Jon tried to imagine traveling that distance with a ship that shut down once a day, the uncertainty of going dark without knowing if the engine would even fire up again, too far from anything for secondary power to matter, too far to call for help.

Jon swallowed, hard. "You've got some kind of luck, man," he said.

The kid's expression shifted subtly, a change Jon couldn't read in the dim light. "Something like that," the kid said. He turned around and gestured impatiently for Jon to follow. "Well, come on. You're not going to be much help out there."

Jon took a few long steps up the gangplank. Two more guys were sitting atop a neat stack of crates on one side of the small cargo hold. The taller one watched Jon with wide, unblinking eyes, his posture poised and his clothing old-fashioned, oddly formal, covering him almost completely from the hat on his head to the gloves on his hands and boots on his feet. He was so thin he looked like a wrong move might snap him in half. Beside him another kid was sitting cross-legged on the crates. His clothes were tattered and too big for him, his thumbs sticking through holes in the too-long sleeves, and he smiled a little when he met Jon's eyes.

"You coming?" The pilot waited at the hatch down to the engine room, one foot one the top of the ladder.

"Lead the way," Jon said. He felt the other kids' eyes on him as he set his toolbox on the floor and climbed down.

There wasn't much space in the engine room, and the kid hovered uncomfortably close to Jon as he set to work. He took his time getting a feel for the ship, partly because the kid seemed impatient and Jon was feeling contrary, but mostly because it was an old engine with some peculiar modifications, and Jon wasn't entirely sure what to make of it.

"Did you do all this?"

The pilot's arms were crossed over his chest, his face still set in a suspicious mask behind a few days' worth of beard that didn't do much to hide his soft features. "No," he said. He seemed to relax a fraction and added, "I already know it's the modifications messing things up, but I can't figure out where, exactly."

"Have you been flying her long?"

"No," the kid said. "Just since we left Corvus, about seven weeks ago. Not that it matters. We've already had about every problem you can name."

"I'm going to need somebody up in the cockpit firing up the engines so I can check them out," Jon said. He didn't like working with somebody staring over his shoulder. "Does the comm work?"

"Yeah. It works."

It looked for a moment like the kid wasn't going to leave, but Jon just waited, didn't let himself look worried or impatient.

"Okay," the kid said finally. "Do you think you can—"

"Won't know until I check it out," Jon told him.

The kid nodded quickly and scrambled up the ladder. Jon found his way around the engine room easily enough. He made a mental note of where all the important parts were located, set his sensors and meters in place, then called up the cockpit to have the kid fire it up. Up and off, up and off, Jon asked him to go through a few cycles, listening and watching for anything that felt out of place. The pilot did exactly as Jon asked, never argued, although he did ask a few times what Jon was looking for.

When Jon had a good idea where he should start, he called up and said, "Okay, that's good. Power her down now."

"Do you know what's wrong?" The kid's voice was tinny and distant over the comm.

"I have an idea where to start," he answered honestly.

There was a pause, then the pilot said, "Okay. Thank you." The comm clicked off.

Jon looked over the engine room and took a deep breath. The ship was, to put it mildly, a big fucking mess. He was amazed the crew had managed to get it out of orbit at all, much less all the way from the Corvus system.

"Can you fix it?"

Jon turned so quickly he almost smacked his head into a support crossbeam. One of the kids was sitting at the edge of the engine room hatch, swinging his legs back and forth and peering down at Jon with a curious expression. With his oversized clothes and untrimmed hair he looked about twelve years old, and Jon had to resist the urge to ask him where the fuck his parents were. Even if the kid answered, it wouldn't be anything Jon wanted to hear.

"Maybe," Jon said, wiping a hand across his brow. Even with the ship at bay it was hot in the engine room. Much hotter than it should be, and that was another thing he would have to fix before the ship would fly properly. "It'll take some work."

"What's wrong?"

"Power's getting from the reactor to the mag ring but it's not staying there," Jon began, pointing the wrench around the engine room, "the launch drive's not talking to the thrusters, the accelerometer's not talking to anything, and the computer that's supposed to be doing all the talking thinks it's predicting ionospheric weather somewhere around Alpha Arietis."

"Huh." The kid kicked his feet a few more times. "So if we had tried to land on a planet, we probably would have exploded before gravity had a chance to tear us apart, and if we'd gone within a few hundred thousand kilometers of a star all of our EM systems would have shorted out?"

Jon gave the kid a considering look. "Yeah, that's about right."

The kid grinned sheepishly. "I tried to figure out what was going on. I don't really know engines, not to work on them or anything, but I learned about them in school and—well, I think I pissed Spencer off. He told me I was just making it worse. But you can fix it, right?"

"Maybe," Jon said again, more slowly, but he was thinking, _Where the fuck are you from, kid?_ In the parts of the galaxy Jon knew, there hadn't been schools or anything similar for decades. But he didn't ask. Asking questions of strangers never led to anything good. "If I can get parts," he added. He was pretty sure he could, but the kid didn't need to know that. It was good ship, but it was in shit shape. Jon kind of wanted to give the pilot a stern lecture about proper ship maintenance, but that was dangerously close to interfering. He'd fix the ship, take the kids' money, send them on their way. "We don't see many ships like this around here."

"How much will it cost?"

"Eight thousand," Jon said without looking up. It was about four times what the parts and his time were worth, but it was still a better deal than any other the kids would find on the station. Half the people here would just as soon strip the ship for parts and sell the kids to a Markab slave trader than do business with them.

"Huh," the kid said. "I'm guessing the parts are only about eight or nine hundred, though, right?"

Jon fiddled with a stubborn bolt for a second before glancing up. The kid wasn't swinging his legs anymore, and there was something very sharp about the way he was watching Jon. Jon revised his estimate of his age upwards a few years and said carefully, "I can't say. I don't even know if I can find them yet."

"You were talking before, to the guy who runs the bay."

Jon went very still, his hand gripping the wrench, and waited. The door to William's office had been open. Anybody could have listened in.

"It sucks that the fleet's doing sweeps of stations this far out, doesn't it? You guys are so far from everything, you'd think they would just leave you alone."

The Alliance fleet didn't leave anybody alone, but kid probably knew that as well as Jon did.

"We're not smugglers," the kid went on. He was swinging his legs again, talking casually like they were discussing solar storms or the price of water. "So I have no idea, how much would it cost for somebody to buy safe passage, you know, the kind that doesn't leave any record?"

Jon set the wrench down and wiped his hands on his pants. "I can't say," he lied. He knew exactly how much it cost, to the last cent, and how much more it was than the value of everything he owned. "I'm not a smuggler either."

"Okay," the kid said, and he smiled again, wide and bright like Jon had just given him good news. He curled his legs up and jumped to his feet. "I'll stop bothering you now. I'm Brendon, by the way. What's your name?"

Jon hesitated. "Walker," he said finally. "Jon Walker."

"Nice to meet you, Jon."

Brendon took off, his footsteps pounding over the metal floor. Jon went back to work.

Like he'd expected, he had to make things a lot worse before he could start making them better. He had half the engine room taken apart before he thought to look up and wonder how long he'd been at it. There was still a low-grade headache working behind his eyes, and his stomach was reminding him that he hadn't eaten since sometime yesterday.

He stood up and rolled his shoulders, twisted his head from side to side to work the kinks out and turned around. He wasn't alone in the engine room.

He jumped and let out a startled, "Fuck."

The third kid was standing at the bottom of the ladder, leaning back against the rungs. He was holding a mug in each hand and looked like he'd been there for a few minutes at least. "Sorry," he said, not sounding it at all. "I didn't mean to scare you."

"You didn't," Jon said. "I didn't see you there."

"Coffee," the kid said. He offered one of the mugs to Jon.

Jon accepted the mug gratefully and thanked the kid with a nod. The kid withdrew his hand quickly but didn't look away from Jon. He was wearing long gloves and had some kind of wispy fabric wrapped around his neck. Just looking at him Jon had the sudden fear that he was going to get tangled in the engine's moving parts and his brittle bones would snap.

The coffee was lukewarm but strong. Jon really wanted to know where they'd found real coffee—that was information worth having—but he sipped in silence and tried to pretend he wasn't completely weirded out by how the kid was staring at him.

"You should probably know," the kid said. Then he stopped, drank from his own mug, and looked down at his feet.

"What?" Jon asked. He wondered if they'd been in space a lot longer than he'd assumed; that might explain why none of them remembered how to carry on a conversation.

"We can't pay what you told Brendon it would cost," the kid said without looking up. "If that's what you're going to—"

Jon felt suddenly, irrationally annoyed that he couldn't see the kid's face. "You're telling me this now that I've got your engine in pieces all over the floor?" It didn't surprise him that they couldn't pay—hell, he wouldn't pay what he was asking—but he hadn't expected them to come right out and admit it. He could walk away right now, leave them with a ship that wasn't only broken but in pieces, and never look back. He was all for taking advantage of naïve kids who dropped into his path, but he didn't expect them to make it so easy for him. "What the fuck, kid. You've got a fucked up way of doing business."

The kid looked up and tilted his head to one side. "A Pacifican refugee planet?" he guessed. "Or maybe one of the orbital rings of Al Fawaris, but Pacifica is my first guess."

Jon felt his skin go cold despite the heat of the engine room. He didn't have an accent, he'd made sure of that years ago. He never told anybody where he'd lived in the past. It was safer that way. And nobody had ever guessed before. "You're a few thousand light years off," he lied. But he was curious enough what gave him away to ask, "What makes you say that?"

The kid shrugged. "Pacifican refugees always make the mistake of assuming everybody they talk to is younger than them."

"Maybe it's not a mistake," Jon said. The refugee camp on Pacifica IV made war vets or widows out of just about everybody before their fifteenth birthdays. Jon had got out ten years ago, and he'd never once looked back. "Look, kid—"

"Ryan," the kid said.

"What?"

"My name is Ryan, not kid." He made a move as if to offer his hand, but withdrew it quickly. "Ryan Ross. I'm the navigator."

Jon shook his hand. "You know it wasn't the smartest move to wait until I had your ship in pieces before telling me you can't pay. What if I decide not to fix it until you can pay me?"

Jon expected an angry or scared response, but Ryan only looked amused. "Do you like to take things apart without putting them back together?"

Hated it, if he was being honest, but Jon only said, "I like to get paid for my work."

"We'll pay you."

"You just said you couldn't."

"I said we couldn't pay you what you said it would cost."

"It's gonna take more than bad coffee, Ryan."

"It's not bad coffee."

It wasn't, but that was hardly the point. "I mean—"

"We'll work something out," Ryan said evenly. He seemed certain of it. Ryan pushed away from the ladder and put his free hand on a rung, preparing to climb. "If you fix it, we will. Are you hungry? You've been down here for hours."

Jon had no idea so much time had passed. "Yeah," he said. "I am."

Ryan said, "Okay." He climbed the ladder without another word.

Jon stared for a few seconds, then shook his head briskly and turned to get back to work. "What the fuck," he muttered. He set his coffee aside where he wouldn't drop anything into it and tried to remember exactly what he'd been doing.

-

"No," Spencer said. "No way. No fucking way."

Brendon stilled for a second, then started bouncing on his toes again. "Okay, maybe not, it's just an idea. But we need—"

"Not like that. We'll do something else." There wasn't enough room in the cockpit to pace properly, so Spencer gave up after a few steps and sat heavily in his chair. "We can—"

He stopped. He didn't know how to finish that sentence. For the last several weeks—nearly two months now since they'd been in a port—he'd kept them running. He'd found the ship, got it working, got them off the planet and out of sight, coaxed the engines back to life every fucking time they broke down, found this shithole station and brought them here in one piece. But he didn't know what to do next.

Spencer said, "We'll figure something out."

In the navigator's chair, Ryan drew his legs up and rested his chin on his knees. "We don't have a whole lot of options," he said. "We can afford the parts, maybe, but we can't do the rest ourselves."

"Well, you certainly can't. You don't even know what end of a fucking wrench to hold." Spencer regretted it as soon as he said it. He exhaled sharply. "I didn't mean—I meant—"

"We need help," Ryan said simply.

As much as he hated it, Spencer had to agree. He _should_ have been able to repair the ship, but it was older than any he'd flown before, and everything he did caused more problems than it solved. They needed help if they didn't want to be stuck on this station forever.

"I don't trust him," Spencer said. "There's got to be another way. There's—"

"Spence," Ryan interrupted. He pressed his lips together tightly for a second and glanced at Brendon. When he went on he sounded exasperated: "I know you don't like it, but we really, really don't have a lot of choice here. Do we? I mean, seriously, what else can we do? Because I'm open to other options, we both are, if you've got another idea."

Spencer sighed and leaned forward, rested his arms on the instrument panel. All the displays were dark, and there was nothing to see through the window except the gray wall of the docking bay. "Let's sell Brendon into slavery. That might get us the money we need."

"Hey," Brendon said. "I don't like that plan. I'm voting against that one."

"Me too," Ryan said. "We'll kill each other if we don't have anybody else for company."

"Okay, fine, we'll keep him," Spencer muttered.

Brendon grinned and planted a loud kiss on the top of Spencer's head. "You're the best, Captain."

Spencer shoved him away. "Don't fucking call me that. And I still don't think offering passage to a complete stranger who is probably on the run from the Alliance is such a great plan either."

Brendon leaned on the back of the chair and flicked at Spencer's ear. "I hate to remind you, because you're almost pleasant to be around when you start to forget, but you're on the run from the Alliance too."

"Which is a fucking good reason not to trust a complete stranger."

"A stranger who can fix our ship," Ryan said. "That's the important detail here."

"We don't even know if he can," Spencer pointed out. He was a little bit afraid to go down to the engine room; the last time he'd checked it looked like most of the propulsion system and at least half the fuel lines were completely dismantled. The engineer—Jon Walker, Brendon had told him, because he knew Spencer had deliberately not asked the man's name—had been sitting cross-legged in the middle of the mechanical mess, like the machine was slowly eating him alive. Spencer had left without asking what he was doing.

"He can," Brendon said. "I've been asking around."

Spencer rested his head on his forearms and yawned. "Yeah? What did you hear?" He had long since given up trying to figure out how Brendon learned the things he did. Brendon's information-gathering technique seemed to involve being as annoying as possible while delivering wide-eyed, innocent looks, and people tended to answer his questions with a dazed, vaguely alarmed expression on their faces. But it worked. Whatever Brendon did, it worked.

Brendon ticked each item off on his fingers as he recited dutifully, "His name is Jon Walker, he's been working here for about ten months after he and a friend split from a Denebian starcrawler, he's a very good engineer, he's been quietly asking about passage off for nearly as long as he's been here but has turned down a few opportunities for no apparent reason, he's not eager to be around when the Alliance finally starts raiding this far out, and he doesn't have any money but he does have a cat."

Spencer lifted his head and looked at Brendon. "A cat?"

"A real cat?" Ryan asked. "You mean, a living animal?"

"That's what they say," Brendon said. "A real cat, with fur and everything."

"I've never seen a real cat," Ryan said, a hint of wonder in his voice.

"We're not bringing this guy on our ship just because he has a cat," Spencer said.

"No," Ryan agreed, "we're bringing him on because he can fix our ship, and we don't have any other way to pay him."

"I hate it when you try to be sensible," Spencer said. They needed help. They needed an engineer. They'd had Brent for a while, and Brent had got their first ship off the ground, kept it running. He had brought them Brendon too, literally found him in a gutter—and Spencer still wasn't certain how that had progressed from "just for a while, look at him, he's harmless and he's _starving_ " to relying so much on Brendon it was impossible to imagine life without him. But they lost that ship, they lost Brent, they almost fucking died a couple dozen times because Spencer couldn't fix their new ship, because he just didn't know _how_. And now they needed a complete stranger, a man with a face they didn't know and a voice they couldn't trust, and just the _thought_ of letting somebody else on their ship, of putting Ryan and Brendon in danger like that when he was supposed to be keeping them safe—

"Spencer. Spencer, hey, c'mon, breathe."

A hand touched his shoulder, and Spencer jerked upright, every muscle tense. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and tried to pretend his hands weren't shaking.

"Spencer." Ryan's hand was curled around the back of his neck, warm and familiar, and his voice was comforting. "It won't be that bad. We'll work it out."

Spencer began, "We can't trust—"

"Not for sure, no," Brendon interrupted. "But it's a chance we have to take."

Spencer was good at taking chances when he was flying. He was good at dangerous maneuvers, risky courses, missions that everybody else deemed too insane to contemplate. He was good at taking chances when it was him and his ship, empty space and reckless speed and no time for second thoughts.

But with people—that was something else entirely.

He exhaled shakily and rubbed his hand over his face. "Okay. Okay."

Ryan squeezed Spencer's hand reassuringly. "It'll be fine."

"If you say so."

"Although I would like to take this moment to point out how fucked up it is that I have to the optimistic one when you get like this."

Spencer didn't have to ask what Ryan meant by _like this_. "You're better at it than I am," he said, trying for a smile that didn't quite succeed. It wasn't always true, but it was often enough that he was thankful at least one of them remembered how. "I'll go talk to him. But if he puts us all out the airlock and steals our ship two days out, I'm holding both of you personally responsible."

"It's a responsibility we solemnly accept," Ryan said.

"After you talk to him, you're going to sleep," Brendon said. "You look like a reanimated macroplague corpse."

"Wow, you sure know how to flatter a guy." Spencer couldn't remember the last time he'd had a decent stretch of sleep; the constant worry of being in deep space with an unreliable ship didn't lend itself to many relaxing hours. He put his hands on the arms of the chair and stood up.

Brendon sketched a lazy salute. "My pleasure."

Spencer waved vaguely, more of a meaningless flail than the dismissive gesture he intended, and left the cockpit. Behind him, Brendon began telling Ryan, "I totally saw a real cat once, a long time ago. It was so fucking cool."

Jon Walker was still in the engine room, surrounded by dismantled machinery. The clutter had started to take on some semblance of organization, but Spencer still couldn't figure out what the hell was going on. He was just relieved the man hadn't left like he'd threatened to do when Ryan spoke to him.

When he climbed down the ladder, Jon looked up. There was a flicker of suspicion over his features before he brushed back his dark, sweaty hair. He fixed a smile on his face and said, "Hey. I think I found the source of the problem."

Spencer didn't trust anybody who smiled that easily—except Brendon, but Brendon was the exception to a lot of rules—but he didn't look away and he didn't retreat. He wanted to know what was wrong with his ship. "What is it?"

"The jump drive, you ever use it?" Jon gestured at the smooth, dark sphere buried beneath the rest of the machinery.

"No," Spencer said. The drive was illegal. The Alliance frowned upon any ship modification that made it easier for anybody to escape, and a jump drive with a range of hundreds of light years definitely qualified. But Spencer hadn't noticed it until long after he'd stolen the ship, and with everything else going wrong he hadn't tried to fix it. "I tried to get it to work once, but instead of a jump I got a feedback blast that almost blew the reactor, so I didn't really want to try again."

"Smart move," Jon said. "I think the sphere itself is probably fine. It looks like it was salvaged from a Solaris-class warbird and those last forever. But it's not installed right, so it's interfering with the other systems. Whoever put it in—well, no offense if he was a friend of yours, but he didn't really have any idea what he was doing."

"I've noticed," Spencer said dryly. He glanced at the solid black shell of the jump drive, but only for a moment. He didn't like to look at it. The surface wasn't so much black as absolutely devoid of light or reflection. In his mind he knew it was like that because of the radiation shielding, thousands of layers and layers of molecule-thin materials wrapped around the antimatter core, but he could never shake the feeling there was something more sinister in that yawning emptiness. He looked away quickly and focused on Jon's hands quickly and surely sorting through the cables while he spoke. It was pretty clear that Jon _did_ know what he was doing, or was at least very good at pretending. Spencer asked, "What can you do?"

"The quick fix is to disconnect it entirely, build the rest of the systems back up around it," Jon said, looking thoughtful.

"What's the not-quick fix?"

"Hook up the jump drive correctly," Jon said. He stopped gathering cables into bunches and looked up at Spencer, his hands still. "Do it so it doesn't override any of the other drives—that's what's been shutting you down. But that would take a while, and I get the impression you guys don't want to hang around this place that long."

"We don't," Spencer said. He didn't offer an explanation, and Jon didn't ask for one.

After a moment, Jon went on, "Not to mention, if you can't afford to pay me to fix the mag drive, you really can't afford to pay me to put in a jump drive."

Spencer leaned against the ladder, his hands behind his back on the warm rungs. Jon was watching him expectantly, waiting for whatever he had to offer, and it was really fucking unfair, because he didn't _look_ like somebody who would take advantage of three guys with a crippled ship or turn them over to the Alliance for reward money or sabotage the ship to salvage it later or wait until they were in deep space before shutting them out of the airlock, but looks were always deceiving and he could be planning any of those things or something worse.

Spencer asked, "Why don't you sell your cat?"

"What?"

The metal of the ladder was digging into his palms. Spencer forced himself to let it go and tucked his hands into his pockets instead. "We heard around the station you've been looking for passage off but can't afford it."

"Is that what you heard?" Jon asked mildly.

"But you could afford it," Spencer said. "You've got a living animal. That's worth a hell of a lot."

"Are you asking—"

"I'm asking why you don't sell your cat."

Jon stared at him for a long moment. After the silence grew just long enough to be uncomfortable, he said, "I like having her around. Cats are pretty helpless in space, but she's good company and I don't want somebody to put her in a cage just because I need money."

"Even if it means you're stuck here?"

"You think that's a stupid reason to hang onto something."

"Well, we have Brendon, so I can't really judge," Spencer said, and _fuck_ , he was a lot more tired than he thought, because he hadn't meant to say that.

But Jon laughed, and the tension dissolved immediately. "Look, kid—you're Spencer, right? Is that your name?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, Spencer." Jon put down the bundle of cables and leaned back on both hands, looking disconcertingly at home in Spencer's engine room. "If you're about to offer me passage away from this place in exchange for fixing your ship, I'll probably accept."

"You will?" Spencer was surprised, but even stronger than the surprise was his relief. "That's—yeah. That's what I'm going to offer."

"It's a fair trade," Jon said.

"How soon?"

"Two, three days to get the drive working again."

It was longer than Spencer wanted to stay, but it would have to do. "You didn't ask where we're headed."

"As long as it's out from here, I don't really care," Jon said.

Out meant away from the more populated star systems, away from the Inner Ring systems and the center of the Alliance's power. Out was where everybody wanted to go, even if they didn't know what they would find.

"Yeah," Spencer said quietly. "I get that."

Jon pushed himself to his feet, brushed his hands on his pants and held one out to Spencer. "Deal?"

Spencer shook his hand; Jon's grip was warm and strong. "We don't have much room," he said. "It can be kind of cramped and four people is really the max."

Jon nodded. "Yeah, these old ships weren't exactly designed for comfort. Luckily I'm not very big, and neither is my cat."

"Okay," Spencer said. He glanced down, realized he was still holding onto Jon's hand, and let go of it quickly. "Okay. That's okay."

"I am going to need some parts," Jon said, kicking at the jumble of cables at his feet. "I think I'll be able to find what I need, but..."

"Yeah, okay. Just let me know," Spencer said. He turned and put one foot on the ladder. "Or Ryan or Brendon. Brendon especially, he's good at finding things."

"Will do," Jon agreed. When Spencer looked back, he was already sitting cross-legged on the floor again, back at work.

Ryan and Brendon were waiting in the cargo bay. Neither of them even tried to look like they hadn't been eavesdropping.

Brendon jumped to his feet when Spencer climbed through the hatch. "He agreed?"

"It's good," Spencer said. "We're set. It's good." Maybe if he said it twice, if he said it like he really meant it, maybe that would make it true. "I'm going to sleep now. Wake me up in a few hours, okay?"

Ryan said, "No problem," in that way that meant he was lying through his teeth, but Spencer was too tired to argue. He stumbled into the cabin and collapsed face-down on the lower bunk. There was something hard underneath him: one of Ryan's tablets. He wrested it free and dropped it on the floor. He was distantly aware of somebody tugging off his shoes and tucking a blanket over him, but he was asleep before he could say thanks.

Spencer woke some time later when something jostled the bunk and he felt a hand on his leg. He was alert immediately. His eyes snapped open and both hands clenched into fists, and he started to sit up, struggling to untangle the blanket around his legs.

"It's just me." Ryan nudged Spencer's legs and settled onto the foot of the bunk. "Wake up, sleeping beauty."

Spencer rubbed his eyes and obligingly shifted aside to make room. He still felt groggy, like every limb was weighted down with lead. "What's up?"

"Don't freak out, but—"

Spencer started to sit up, but Ryan leaned on his legs to hold him in place. He could feel the strange, hard line of Ryan's arm through the layers of clothing, and shit, _shit_ , he should have thought of that. Another person on board, living with them constantly, he was bound to notice something. Ryan was never as careful as he should be. Spencer reached down without thinking and wrapped his hand around Ryan's wrist, brushing his fingers over the smooth metallic joints hidden by the long gloves.

Ryan raised an eyebrow, but Spencer didn't say anything. He didn't have to, not about that.

"I said don't freak out," Ryan said, poking him in the belly with his other hand.

Spencer scowled, but he didn't shove Ryan away. "That is not a good way to keep me from freaking out."

"It would be if you would listen to me."

"What am I not freaking out about?"

"There's news." Ryan fidgeted a little and played with the edge of the blanket. "From Meera. A settler came in a few hours ago."

"That's where the Alliance made those arrests." He managed to sound pretty calm in spite of the way his heart was pounding. He shoved the blanket down and began to sit up again. "They're looking for somebody, and now they're coming here. That's the news, right? The squad is coming here."

Ryan put his hand in the center of Spencer's chest and pushed him back down. "Yeah, they are, but they're still a few days away. We'll be long gone by then."

"How the hell are we going to manage that? Our fucking ship doesn't fly."

"Jon says he can have it working by tomorrow."

Spencer laid his head back down on the pillow. "That soon? That's not what he told me."

Ryan smiled. "Yeah, it is. You've been asleep for a whole day."

"What? I told you to—"

"Wake you up, yeah, I know." He squirmed around a little, making himself more comfortable with Spencer's legs as an armrest. "I was going to, but Brendon wouldn't let me. He said you needed your beauty sleep."

Spencer raised an eyebrow.

Ryan patted Spencer's leg and smiled a little. "It's fine, Spence. There's nothing you can be doing right now anyway, not until we can fly again."

"I could be helping the engineer." But Spencer didn't make any move to get up. He was enjoying the unfamiliar feeling of waking up slowly without the help of shouts or alarms or, worst of all, the deadly, eerie silence of a ship without power.

"His name is Jon, and Brendon's helping him."

"That'll end well."

Ryan rolled his eyes. "Just because you suck at giving instructions doesn't mean Brendon's bad at following them."

"I don't—"

"You totally do," Ryan said. "They're getting along fine, so stop worrying."

They were stuck on an unfamiliar station in a broken ship, trusting a complete stranger to fix it in time to outrun a squad of Alliance soldiers. Spencer wasn't going to stop worrying any time soon. But neither was Ryan going to stop telling him to. He hadn't stopped saying it since Spencer had shown up at his place in the middle of the night after three years apart and Ryan had taken one look at him and said, "Don't worry, they won't look for you here. I know some guys who can help." It would be annoying, that stubborn optimism that Spencer knew was so rarely genuine, if he didn't need to hear it so much.

"I was thinking," Ryan said.

"Did it hurt?"

"Fuck off. I was thinking about where we should go next."

"You have a plan?" Spencer tried to ignore the way his stomach twisted with new anxiety.

"Maybe. Yeah, I think so. There's some intel. I think it could be something."

Ryan always had a plan, another idea and another scheme devised with the help of his vast network of contacts, shadowy men and women without faces operating in secret throughout the galaxy. Spencer did his best not to ask for details, but Ryan usually told him anyway, either unaware or uncaring that two men knowing was twice as dangerous as one. The one time he mentioned it, Ryan only blinked and said, "But it's you," and that was that. Spencer never protested again. Ryan had already given up everything else to help him; Spencer wasn't going to ask him to give up his fight too, however futile it might be.

"So where are we going?" Spencer asked.

"Zion," Ryan said.

"Ryan."

Ryan titled his chin defiantly. "Yeah?"

"Zion is _crawling_ with Alliance presence. There's no way we'll get through there."

"We will. We won't be staying," Ryan said. "It's just recon."

"Recon for what?"

"There are reports that the Chancellor's force has secured one of the moons. Moved all the inhabitants out whether or not they wanted to leave."

"Arrested them?"

Ryan shrugged. "Probably. Nobody seems to know where they went, but the place is under heavy guard now."

"You think the Chancellor is taking up residence?"

"Pete thinks it's possible, and I agree. Him or a member of his family. Maybe a high-ranking official. That's why we need to do recon." Pete was one of Ryan's many contacts. Spencer didn't know anything about the man besides his first name, but he imagined all of them as tiny spiders on a web, connected by fine lines of information and secrets. He sometimes wondered who was at the center of the web, but he never asked.

"Why us?"

"We're the closest."

Spencer didn't like that Ryan's network of revolutionaries knew where they were. "Just recon."

Ryan hesitated, then nodded.

Spencer sighed. "Yeah, okay. Zion. But we're taking the long way around. We'll go by Eliezer and head for Leviathan to sell the cargo. Let's just hope this piece of shit gets us that far."

He didn't need to tell Ryan that a system under the Chancellor's control would be one of the best-guarded places in the galaxy. Spencer wasn't even sure he wanted to discourage him. If he found himself in the same room—hell, on the same planet—as the Chancellor or any member of the man's family, he'd be first in line to take a shot.

"I'll set the course," Ryan said. He stared up at the underside of the top bunk like he was already calculating the coordinates in his mind.

They weren't any closer to leaving, but having a destination in mind reassured Spencer a bit. Ryan figured out where to go, Spencer figured out how to get them there. It was a good system, even when they decided on a destination that was sure to get them all killed.

Spencer sighed and shoved the blanket down.

"You don't have to get up," Ryan said. To enforce his words he stretched out on the bunk, hooking a leg and an arm over Spencer to hold him in place. He kissed Spencer softly, rested his head on Spencer's shoulder, and said through a yawn, "I want to take a nap."

"I just slept for a whole day. I don't need a nap," Spencer said, but he didn't push Ryan away. He rubbed his hand up and down Ryan's back, unconsciously tracing the subtle lines where metal met flesh. Ryan shivered slightly and made a pleased noise. Spencer closed his eyes and muttered, "I just want to see what's going on in my engine room."

"I haven't heard any crashes or mysterious explosions in a few hours at least," Ryan told him. "I'm sure it's perfectly fine."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A missing scene by emilyenrose is here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/69848.


	2. Chapter 2

**ii.**

The night before they left Tom dragged Jon away for a few hours, ignoring his protests that he had work to do before they launched.

"Strangers are stealing you away, Jonny," Tom said, already halfway to drunk, as he slung a long arm around Jon's shoulders and steered him out of the bay. "This might be my last chance to destroy your innocence."

Jon laughed. "Don't worry. I think we've got that all covered."

"I hope so," Tom said solemnly. "I hope so."

Neither of them mentioned that it was likely the last time they would ever see each other. Maybe Tom was thinking about it, maybe he wasn't, but Jon let himself be steered. After he'd made the deal with Spencer, Jon had gone back to their bunk in the station and said, "Maybe you could—"

But Tom had started shaking his head before Jon even finished. "Not for me," he'd said, blinking at his metal cup of whiskey. "I've got plans. I met some people, they got away from Ypsilon before the end and they've got a line on—"

"I don't want to hear it," Jon had said, holding up both hands. "I don't do that anymore." Ypsilon-X5H was one of the many planets the Alliance had ruined , and Jon didn't have to ask about the people Tom knew to guess they were either survivors looking for revenge or rebels hoping to acquire the same weapon the Alliance had used. It was safer for Jon not to know.

Jon hung out with the guys for a few hours, drinking and laughing, ignoring the pang he felt when the night wound down. Drunk and sleepy, Jon admitted to himself that he would probably miss them.

When Jon finally dragged himself away, William planted a wet kiss on his cheek and Butcher said, "Stay safe, man," and Tom gave him a hug and Jon struggled to keep the smile on his face. They were good guys. The station hadn't been a bad place to hide for a few months.

He'd already moved his things into _The World Is A Broken Bone_. Jon didn't own much, and when he climbed clumsily down the ladder to the engine room Clover was waiting for him, her eyes glowing reproachfully in the dim light

"Oh, shut up," Jon said as he stretched out on the floor. It occurred to him that he probably didn't need to sleep on the floor in the engine room, but he didn't want to move again. He closed his eyes and hoped that the kids wouldn't put him out an airlock for spending his first day on crew hungover and melancholy.

After a few days on board, he realized two things: first, that he needn't have worried—hungover or not, it was impossible to remain melancholy for very long with Brendon helping him in the engine room—and second, that Brendon had been lying when he said they weren't smugglers. Jon didn't want to ask what was in the crates they had in their cargo bay, but he didn't have to ask to know it was valuable and probably illegal.

"Spencer says I only make things worse," Brendon confided to Jon on their fourth day out. They were sitting cross-legged on the engine room floor. The propulsion systems were still running hot, so Jon had Brendon helping him repair the radiation coils.

"Do you?" Jon asked. Brendon was no engineer, but he was good help and even better company, so Jon didn't mind having to watch to make sure the wrong wires were never crossed.

Brendon laughed. It was such an unfamiliar sound, someone laughing so easily and brightly as Brendon did, but Jon thought he might be getting used to it. "Yeah, sometimes," Brendon admitted. "Okay, most of the time. But it's not like he does any better. This isn't what he's used to—" He broke off suddenly and looked down, concentrating very hard on the panel he was dismantling. "We had an engineer. He died."

There was something so plaintive in the way he said it, so bitter and quietly sad. Jon's hands stilled for a moment. "I'm sorry," he said.

Brendon shrugged. Jon didn't want to ask what had happened, but there was a small, selfish part of him that was relieved. He hadn't exactly inquired about the kids' politics before signing on. He'd assumed—hoped—that if they were willing to take him on no questions asked, if they were as eager to leave the station as quickly as he was, they weren't on friendly terms with any Alliance loyalists.

"Well, you're here now," Brendon said after they had been working quietly for a few minutes.

"You don't care about me," Jon said. "You just like having a working ship."

"That is nice," Brendon agreed, nodding. "But mostly I'm glad because of your cat. She's _awesome_."

Jon couldn't help but smile a little at that. "I think the feeling is mutual." Brendon and Clover had a seemingly endless ability to entertain each other for hours on end. Brendon took Clover's determination to find every possible hiding place on the ship as a personal challenge, and Clover interpreted every moment Brendon spent not moving as an invitation to use him as a climbing post or napping spot.

"And, well," Brendon went on, after another brief pause, "Spencer worries a lot less now."

Considering that the ship wasn't losing power every twenty hours or so, but Jon was glad he hadn't been around to see what it was like when Spencer worried a lot _more_. Jon had known a lot of intense, overworked, micromanaging pilots in his life—it was practically a requirement for the job—but even on a good day Spencer was wound tighter than a mag drive solenoid.

Jon thought for a moment before he said, "He doesn't trust me."

To his surprise, Brendon grinned. "Well, no. Of course not. Spencer doesn't trust anybody except Ryan. Don't take it personally."

"I don't."

Jon didn't mean anything by it, definitely didn't mean to sound as sharp as he did, but Brendon bristled immediately and fixed him with a cool glare. "He's a really good pilot," he said.

"I didn't say he wasn't," Jon said. He hadn't had a chance to judge yet. So far they hadn't done anything except launch from the station and cruise across open space.

Brendon looked like he was going to argue, but he only said, "Okay." It sounded more like a warning than an agreement.

Jon told himself it shouldn't make a difference, he was just on board to keep the fucking ship running until they got to the next station and he could leave, but he didn't want Brendon to be mad at him. He asked, just trying to make conversation, "How long have you been with them?"

Brendon shrugged. "A while."

"How'd you meet up?"

"The usual way," Brendon said. "I was wandering, they needed another guy. Nothing special. Hey, where does this go again?" He gestured to the panel he was working on.

It was a pretty clear signal to change the subject, so Jon gave up and went back to work. After a few minutes Brendon started singing to himself; he always did when it was quiet for too long. He seemed to know a song for every star system, including several that didn't even exist anymore. Jon wondered if he collected songs like some men collected weapons or scars, if he thought about how he was singing words and melodies written by dead people from dead planets centuries ago. And he wondered why Brendon never talked about himself even when he talked more or less constantly about everything else, and why Spencer acted like every person he met was an undercover Alliance agent, and what was in the coded messages Ryan was always sending and receiving, but he didn't ask. He didn't want them to ask questions about him either.

Almost like he knew Jon was thinking about him, Ryan poked his head through the engine room hatch and said, "We picked up a distress signal." And he was gone again.

Jon looked at Brendon, who shrugged. "Sometimes we check them out, if we're close," he said.

"Why?" Jon asked.

"In case someone needs help," Brendon said. "Why else?"

"Most ships don't," Jon pointed out. He had never been on a ship before that did. Distress signals meant trouble, and going toward trouble was not a good way to stay alive. "It could be dangerous."

"Yeah," Brendon said. "We do it anyway. I'm gonna see what's going on, okay?" He scrambled to his feet without waiting for Jon's reply and climbed the ladder quickly.

After a moment, Jon's curiosity got the better of him and he followed. The other three guys were crowded into the cockpit, Spencer in the pilot's chair and Ryan in the navigator's and Brendon standing behind them. The steady, high-pitched beep of the distress signal filled the cramped space.

"Found it," Ryan said. "It's a planet, three million klicks. It's..." He trailed off, frowning. "The message is a couple of weeks old. It's not a standard signal. I don't know this language. Let me just check..." His fingers flew over the glowing panel. The beeping cut out abruptly, replaced by a gargled static transmission.

Spencer glanced at Ryan. "Can you translate it?"

"Trying," Ryan said.

"There might still be somebody alive," Brendon said quietly. "A non-standard message, that usually means—"

"There won't be anybody alive," Spencer interrupted. He didn't look at Brendon.

"You don't _know_ —"

"There won't be anybody alive."

Jon glanced from Spencer to Brendon, taking in the rigid set of Spencer's shoulders, the worried way Brendon was watching him. Brendon opened his mouth to say something else, but he changed his mind, bit his lower lip and kept quiet. He noticed Jon looking and gave him a small, almost apologetic smile.

Jon leaned the back of Ryan's chair for a better look at the words and numbers scrolling across the screen. He couldn't make any sense of it, though Ryan seemed to be following the rapid, flickering display easily enough. Ryan's lips were moving as he muttered under his breath. "Okay," he said finally. "Okay, I got it."

His expression didn't change, but he didn't go on until Brendon asked, "What's it say?"

"Shit," Ryan said. He sat back in his chair and exhaled slowly.

Spencer didn't even turn his head. "I told you there wouldn't be any survivors."

Brendon said tentatively, "Ryan? What does it say?"

Ryan looked at Spencer before answering. "They were attacked," he said. "Alliance squadron. I can't - I don't know how good this translation is, I've never seen this language before - but I think it was a mining colony. The message is from a transport that tried to get away."

"Maybe they did," Brendon said. "Maybe they did get away. The signal is still transmitting."

Ryan glanced from Brendon to Spencer. "I don't know."

"That doesn't mean shit," Spencer said. "This is a fucking stupid waste of time." He punched something on the panel. The planet is in sight through the window, a pale lonely sphere. "We're getting out of here. We shouldn't be this close to a star anyway, not with—"

"You can now," Jon said. "The EM problem is fixed."

Spencer started and turned and fixed Jon with a narrow glare. "You think we should check it out too?"

"I didn't say that."

"Good," Spencer said, turning away again. "We're not getting any fucking closer to that planet—"

"But they might need help," Brendon said, his voice growing desperate. "Spencer, they might need help."

"Shut the fuck up!" Spencer snapped. "God, could you just shut the fuck up for five fucking minutes? You don't fucking know anything, okay, so just - it's just a fucking signal. It doesn’t mean anything. Just a fucking computer. There's nobody alive on that planet. They don't leave anybody alive. They never leave anybody alive. They don't even leave fucking cockroaches, so just _stop_ —"

"Spencer," Ryan said.

His voice was quiet, so very quiet, but Spencer broke off abruptly and looked down.

Ryan turned deliberately toward Brendon. Jon couldn't read what passed between them, but it ended when Brendon spun around and stormed out of the cockpit, his footsteps loud and angry on the metal floor. Ryan twisted a little further in his chair to look at Jon, but Jon didn't wait for him to say anything. He held up his hands, conciliatory, and left the cockpit.

He considered going down to the engine room, but he changed him mind when he passed by the open cabin door. Brendon was sitting on the lower bunk, his elbows resting on his knees, his face in his hands.

Jon hesitated before going in. It was his cabin too, technically, but he still felt like an intruder sleeping there. There were only two bunks, one stacked tightly atop the other; the ship was designed for a crew of four on a rotating schedule, and personal space was nonexistent. They didn't do much crew rotation now: as far as Jon could tell Spencer never slept except for when Ryan dragged him into one of the bunks and refused to let him move until he was rested.

And that, Jon thought ruefully, was another thing he wasn't going to ask about. There was little enough privacy on the ship as it was.

Jon tapped lightly on the door. "Hey."

Brendon looked up and smiled crookedly. He patted the bed beside him, and Jon took the invitation to sit down. "You didn't know you were signing on to a crew of crazy people, did you?"

"I had a pretty good idea. You don't hide it well." Jon was relieved when Brendon laughed, so he decided to go ahead and ask, "What was that all about?"

Brendon ran a hand through his hair, tugging at the ends, and sighed. "I wish he wasn't always right about this."

"About the survivors?"

"There never are any," Brendon said.

"Do you expect there to be?" Jon was inclined to agree with Spencer: the Alliance never left anybody alive on the surface, not when it decided a planet needed to be cleared.

"No," Brendon admitted softly. "But there might be."

For one fleeting moment Brendon looked so despondent Jon was tempted to put an arm around his shoulders and tell him it would be okay. But before he could do anything, Brendon yawned and fell backward on the bed.

"I'm going to sleep," he said, closing his eyes. When Brendon wanted a conversation to be over, he wasn't subtle about it.

Jon took that as his cue to leave. He went down to the engine room to get some more work done. He thought he might be ready to test out the jump drive, but he wanted to check a few more things first, make sure the containment systems and secondary failsafes were working as they should. He didn't know jump drives as well as he knew ordinary mag drives, although the principles behind them were the same. An ordinary mag drive could make quick, controlled jumps over short distances. String enough of those jumps together and a ship could travel immense distances faster than light.

But the ship had to stop and recalculate its position and redistribute mass-energy in the Alcubierre web with every jump, and that kind of travel was easy to track and easy to stop for anybody with the right tools—and the Alliance had all the right tools. A jump drive did essentially the same thing, but it made much bigger jumps—hundreds of light years, sometimes farther—and so used a hell of a lot more energy. That's where the antimatter sphere came into it, and that's why Jon was wary of fucking around too much with the jump drive. He didn't want to be responsible for starting a runaway antimatter reaction that engulfed a few thousand kilometers of space in the blink of an eye.

After a few hours, Jon gave up and climbed back up the ladder. He looked into the cabin before heading to the cockpit. Brendon was fast asleep in the lower bunk, Clover curled up by his side. Neither of them stirred when Jon tugged the blanket over Brendon's shoulder.

He padded barefoot through the ship. The metal floor of the cargo bay was cool to the touch, and he paused to listen every few steps. The engine sounded good, nothing out of place, but he wasn't sure he trusted the quiet. He didn't know the ship well enough yet.

Jon was surprised to see a planet framed in the cockpit window. The surface was brown and gray with silent, churning storms. The smoke in the atmosphere was impenetrable, but the debris littering space in orbit around the planet told the story well enough. Ryan had said it was a mining colony, and that meant the Alliance wouldn't have wanted to permanently damage the planet itself. Just the infrastructure, just the population. Usually they did it by hitting the surface with a gamma burst or setting the atmosphere on fire, and simultaneously destroying all the support satellites and habitats in orbit.

The Alliance called it nondestructive reallocation. It would be a couple of centuries or longer before the planet was habitable again.

In the cockpit, Spencer was at the helm, and Ryan was perched on the arm of his chair. He was leaning down with his arms wrapped around Spencer, his chin resting on Spencer's shoulder. Neither of them was speaking, and Jon started to turn away. It was too fragile a moment, too intimate. He shouldn't be intruding.

But Ryan glanced up when Jon hesitated in the doorway. He wasn't wearing his scarf, and Jon caught a glimpse of something silver and metallic beneath the collar of his shirt. He looked away quickly, his throat suddenly tight, and when he looked back Ryan was watching him with an unreadable expression. Ryan opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but changed his mind and shook his head, a small smile on his lips.

Ryan stood up, tilted Spencer's chin up to kiss him, and said, "I'm going to sleep. You should too, once we're clear of orbit."

Spencer reached up and wrapped his hand around the back of Ryan's neck, pulled him down for another kiss, relaxed and easy. "Sure," he said, letting go. "In a few hours, maybe. Sleep well."

Ryan brushed his hand over Spencer's hair and nodded at Jon as he left. Jon had no idea what that meant, but he stepped forward, not trying to be quiet, and slipped into the navigator's chair.

"I thought you—oh." Spencer looked at him steadily for a second, then faced forward again.

"Are we in orbit?"

"Yeah."

"Find anything?"

"Junk."

The space around them was littered with broken fragments of ships and stations, twisted and charred metal, massive pieces turning and tumbling slowly. It was a dangerous mess but Spencer didn't seem concerned.

"Nothing else?" Jon asked.

Spencer was flying manually, checking the instruments constantly, and his shoulder tensed almost imperceptibly at Jon's question. "There's nothing alive down there," he said.

The scorched remains of a small cargo ship spun by, so close Jon flinched and was surprised he didn't hear metal scraping on metal overhead. "Are we—um, maybe this is a stupid question, but why are we flying through a debris field?"

"Because if there is something out here, I don't want it to see us." Spencer made a few adjustments on the panel and leaned forward to watch the transport pass overhead. "This shit's so hot, it's practically glowing. It'll blind any drive-sig sensors they left behind."

"Oh. Good idea." Jon waited a beat, then asked, "You learn that flying fighters for the Alliance?"

It was pretty impressive how little Spencer reacted. A jerk of one hand, a quick widening of his eyes, the lines of his shoulders rigid where they had been relaxed, but he didn't sound surprised when he said, "There goes your chance at plausible deniability when we get caught."

"I doubt it would matter much to the marshals," Jon said.

"Probably not," Spencer agreed, He looked at Jon. "What about you?"

Jon leaned back and pulled his feet up on the chair. Just like Ryan did when he sat here, just like Brendon did. "What about me?"

"Does is matter to you?" Spencer asked.

"That you're a deserter?"

Spencer didn't say anything, but he didn't look away either.

Jon ran a hand over his face and said, "I've got no love for the Alliance. I don't know why you would join up in the first place, but I'm not going to hold it against you that you decided to get out."

Spencer was silent for a long time. Finally, he said, "I thought it would protect my family. And I guess it did, for a little while. My mom was sick, and we couldn't afford the doctors or medicine without help."

Jon asked hesitantly, "Where are they now?" Thirty seconds of conversation and he'd already learned more about Spencer than he had in days of traveling with the man, and he didn't want to push too far. But he was too curious not to ask: the family of an Alliance soldier would definitely be protected and cared for, but the family of a deserter could be found just as a guilty under Alliance law.

Spencer shrugged. "I don't know. We're from Nuevo Montenegro. They left for a refugee camp long before I left the Alliance. I don't even know if they're still alive."

Nuevo Montenegro was a planet that had been nondestructively reallocated a few years ago. Rumor had it the Alliance had taken out the terraforming factories to put a stop to atmosphere modulation and let the planet suffocate in a slow, painful death.

"You said 'we,'" Jon said. "Ryan and Brendon too?"

"Just Ryan."

"And he wasn't..."

Spencer gave him a wry look. "Can you imagine Ryan as a soldier?"

Jon grinned. "Yeah, okay. Not so much."

He thought at first Spencer wasn't going to elaborate, but after a moment Spencer said, "We've known each other forever. I needed help, and he helped me."

Jon suspected there was more to the story than that. Even if Ryan didn't have any other crimes to his name—Jon thought of the polished metal he'd glimpsed and suppressed a shudder—he would be executed just as surely as Spencer if they were caught.

Instead of pressing, Jon switched tactics. "So what's Brendon's story?"

"Ask him yourself," Spencer said. He didn't sound angry, just a little annoyed. "We met him on Aventine a couple years ago. I have no idea where he's from."

"I have asked," Jon admitted. "He's really good at avoiding questions he doesn't want to answer."

"Yeah, he is." Spencer smiled fondly, and Jon blinked in surprise. Spencer's smile was really nice, it transformed his entire face, but it was gone all too quickly. "I meant that, actually. Brendon likes you."

Jon thought about that for a second. "He seems to like just about everybody."

Spencer gave him a considering look. "Not really."

Jon said, "Fair enough." It would be easy to miss what Brendon wasn't saying under the constant activity. He would have to pay closer attention.

But he pushed that thought aside as soon as it formed. He wouldn't be around long enough for it to matter.

-

They sat in silence for a while.

Jon Walker, Spencer decided, wasn't bad company. At least he knew when to be quiet. He was paying attention, though, watching everything Spencer did with alert curiosity. Spencer wondered briefly if he ought to be worried about that; if Jon was planning to steal _The World Is A Broken Bone_ , his first step would probably be to learn how to fly it.

But Spencer found he couldn't work up any real worry about it. Mostly he was relieved that in another week or so Jon would probably know enough about the ship to take the helm regularly. Ryan could fly well enough, although he didn't like to, and Brendon was actually learning to be a pretty good pilot as long as somebody else was navigating, but Spencer would feel better when all four of them could manage without help. It was the kind of redundancy the Alliance fleet commanders forbade; they thought it was a sign of unacceptable weakness to admit that the pilot might not always be able to do his job. Spencer had seen too many ships and crews lost when one man was incapacitated and nobody else on board knew what to do.

Spencer rolled his shoulders and stifled a yawn. There was nothing of interest showing up on the scanners, nothing unusual triggering the sensors. Navigating an orbital debris field was intensely boring, but he resisted the urge to cut the survey short. He told himself it was because there might be something worth salvaging out there. If they could find anything the Alliance had overlooked, Brendon would be able to sell it to somebody, somewhere. But even as he was thinking it, he shook his head in grim amusement.

"What is it?" Jon asked, looking at him curiously.

Spencer hesitated a moment, then shrugged. "I hate this," he said, gesturing at the hundreds of miles of broken and twisted satellites and habitats visible through the window. "I hate flying through this shit."

"So why do it?"

Spencer smiled crookedly. "You want to be the one to tell Brendon we don't know if there's anything out here because we didn't feel like looking?"

Jon was still looking at him, and Spencer couldn't read his expression at all. "Nope," Jon said. "I'd rather not have to say that." He said it like he thought it was a test and he was unsure of his answer.

Maybe it was, Spencer thought. He and Jon had agreed that they would take Jon as far as the Leviathan Belt, a ring of decaying outlaw stations orbiting a dying red giant about two-thirds of the way to Zion, but he knew Jon didn't have any particular reason for going there except that it was outside of Alliance space and anybody handy with machines could find work. They wouldn't be there for a couple of weeks, but Spencer was already thinking about making Jon another offer when they got there. His ship needed an engineer and Jon was good at what he did. Spencer was still wary, but Brendon liked him and Ryan almost trusted him—enough not to be careful, at least, enough to not hide as much as he usually did around strangers, even if Jon wasn't observant enough to notice yet.

Thinking about Ryan just made Spencer feel more tired. He covered another yawn and rubbed his hand over his face. Ryan was right: he needed to rest. And there was nothing he wanted to do more right now than get back on course, put the ship on autopilot, head back to the cabin and crawl into the bunk, curl up under one of the blankets and fall asleep with Ryan in his arms.

Spencer figured he'd definitely been in space too long if hours of uninterrupted sleep and cuddling were the best fantasies his mind could come up with.

One of the sensors beeped a quiet warning, and Spencer turned his attention back to the display, frowning as he looked to see what it had picked up.

"What is it?" Jon asked.

Spencer didn't answer right away. There was a lot of remnant radiation in orbit, a lot of debris still breaking up and colliding, a few fuel cells and propulsion drives still exploding when the impact was strong enough, and that's what the ship's computer thought it was. The alarm switched off and the sensors began scanning again.

"I don't know," Spencer said slowly. He adjusted a few things, flicking quickly through the sensor output displays. It did look like an explosion in space about a thousand kilometers behind them. It had the same disorganized signature, the same outward expansion of energy. But Spencer wasn't convinced. He began to turn off the bandpass filters on the EM sensors one by one and watched carefully for any spike in the readings.

It only took a few seconds to find what he was looking for. Spencer's heart skipped and he felt cold all over. "Shit."

"What?" Jon sat up and leaned closer. "What is it?"

"That," Spencer said. He jabbed his finger at the display. "The spike at ninety-five gig. That's not a residual signal. That's somebody—"

"Sending a message," Jon finished. "Fuck. Can you see who it is?"

"Not yet," Spencer said. "They're hiding. They're hiding better than we are. We have to—" Another alarm started going off; the computer knew what to look for now but there was too much debris around them, too much radiation for any reading to be reliable. "Fuck fuck _fuck_. Go wake up Ryan and Brendon. Tell Ryan to get his ass in here and—how are you with a railgun, Walker?"

Jon was already on his feet and headed out of the cockpit. "Never fired one," he said.

"Useless fucking mechanic," Spencer muttered. He could see them now on the radar: two ships, both of them trailing him by about fifteen hundred kilometers. The alarms squealed as they fired of their propulsion drives in unison. "Get Brendon on the rail," Spencer said, glancing over his shoulder at Jon. "You make sure our engine doesn't explode. It's not designed for this shit."

"Got it," Jon said, hurrying away.

"And strap yourself in!" Spencer shouted after him. "We go zero-grav for combat."

Jon said something in response, but Spencer couldn't hear what it was and didn't have time to worry about it. The ships behind him were closing fast, but not fast enough for Spencer to get a read on who they were. In a ruined system like this, they could be scavengers or they could be Alliance patrols. But it didn't matter one fucking bit. He fastened himself into his chair and hit the comm.

"Everybody hold on," he said. His voice echoed throughout the ship.

Spencer killed the forward thrust and brought the ship around as sharply as he could. The piece of shit was _really_ not designed for maneuvering, especially not with the cruising-level grav still engaged, and every inch of the ship felt the slam of the rapid deceleration. Spencer apologized silently when he heard a yelp and a shouted curse: he'd probably knocked Jon off the engine room ladder.

"Trouble?" Ryan slipped into the navigator's chair and strapped himself in.

"Little bit," Spencer said. "Brendon ready to shoot things?"

"He is now," Ryan said. His hands flew over the panel, and his display began to flicker and flash with incoming signals. "He stuck Clover in a sleeping bag strapped to the bed. She's gonna be so fucking pissed when this is over."

Spencer hadn't even thought about the cat. Worrying about what happened to the human crew when a ship went into combat freefall was bad enough. He hit the comm again, this time to universal. "I hope you've all got your seatbelts on."

He didn't wait for an answer before disengaging the gravity and switching on the inertial dampeners that would keep them from getting crushed by their own g-forces. He felt the effects immediately: a wave of nausea and disorientation, and the immediate, reassuring responsiveness of the ship's controls. His body felt like shit, but his instincts felt like they could actually _move_ again.

"They're talking," Ryan said. Almost immediately an audio transmission filled the cockpit. Spencer recognized the message after only a few seconds: standard Alliance warning, curt and formal, ordering them to kill their engines and surrender their cargo and submit to boarding or be immediately destroyed.

"I really hate those bastards," Spencer said. "Brendon?"

Brendon's voice came over the comm: "Not in range yet."

A single railgun on an outdated transport was no match for two Alliance patrol ships, but if Brendon could just take out some of their sensors, blind them a little bit, it might buy them some time. Spencer knew his ship could never outrun the others and he could never hide a jump signature well enough, so their only chance of escaping was to make sure the patrols couldn't follow. It would be a hell of a lot simpler, he thought, if there was only one of them.

The warning came through again, louder and angrier, and Spencer said, "Would you—"

Ryan was already punching at the panel to shut it off. "They're on an intercept course. Two minutes and closing until they're within range."

"Spence," Brendon said over the comm.

"I see it," Spencer gritted out. There was too much fucking _shit_ around, way too much for the velocity he was traveling, but Spencer didn't ease off the thrusters and didn't pull out of orbit. He cut hard to one side, missing the splintered, warped remains of a mass driver by about a kilometer, maybe less, and watched without surprise as both of the patrols curved around to follow.

"Ninety seconds," Ryan said.

They were heading straight for the burnt-out corpse of a generation settler: a massive ship designed to hold thousands of passengers that had probably been used as a permanent habitat once the colony was established. The settler grew ever larger in the window as they raced toward it. Spencer felt the pressure of acceleration growing stronger with every second—the inertial dampeners were miscalibrated, they weren't adjusting fast enough to compensate—and he distantly heard Ryan say, "Sixty seconds," and Brendon's alarmed, "Fucking _hell_ ," but he ignored both of them as the settler filled the window.

Spencer had to remind himself they weren't _falling_ , no matter what it looked like, no matter what it felt like. He watched the number on the display drop: fifty kilometers, forty, twenty-five—"Thirty seconds," Ryan said, his voice tight—ten, five, an alarm started chiming somewhere before Ryan shut it off—"They're fucking firing!" Brendon shouted—and at less than one kilometer from the settler Spencer jammed the controls forward, whipping the nose of the ship around so that they were skimming along the ship's surface, the settler hanging over their heads like a ceiling.

The patrols turned too, but as Spencer had expected they pulled out of the apparent dive rather than turning into it and so were immediately speeding in the opposite direction. Alliance pilots always did that; they did too much initial training above planet surfaces to get over that instinct easily.

"They're turning," Ryan said. "Minute twenty to firing range."

"Brendon?"

"Just get me close enough."

Spencer smiled grimly. He had no idea where Brendon had learned to shoot, but he was thankful at least one person on board could hit a target.

"Minute thirty," Ryan said.

It took Spencer a second to register the confusion in his voice. "Wait, what?"

"Minute forty," Ryan said. "What the fuck."

Spencer asked, "They're falling back? Brendon, you got a visual?" They were still skimming close to the settler, following the long, slow curve of the ship around. The planet was coming into view again, like a filthy gray moon rising.

"They're falling back," Brendon confirmed. He sounded just as confused as Spencer felt. "Falling back and pulling away."

The radar told Spencer the same thing. The patrols were peeling off of the settler in twin smooth, swift arcs.

"What the hell are they doing?" Ryan asked.

"I don't—" Spencer's heart dropped and suddenly it was hard to breathe. " _Fuck_. Hold on." He shoved the controls forward, hard, and felt the painful jerk and twist as the dampeners went haywire trying to follow such a sharp turn at such a high speed. It hurt like fucking hell and he heard something groaning—stupid fucking _ship_ , he thought furiously, you better fucking hold—but he punched the acceleration up again, again, dragging the lumbering piece of shit ship away from the settler as fast as he could make it.

"Thrusters are overheating," Jon said calmly through the comm.

Spencer started at the sound of his voice; he'd almost forgotten about Jon. "Give me a another fucking _minute_ , just—"

The settler exploded.

There was a moment of perfect, blinding silence as the shockwave from the explosion engulfed their ship, and Spencer thought, what a stupid way to die, what a _stupid_ —

Then every alarm began shrieking and the ship was tossed carelessly end over end like a discarded toy and Spencer felt undirected gravity tugging at every limb, his bones and muscles and head throbbing like hell, and somebody was shouting something over the comm and the restraints on his seat were cutting into his skin and, "Dead ahead, one—no both, a minute and closing. Fuck, they're firing." Ryan. Ryan shouting at him, Ryan still doing his job which meant they weren't dead, not yet.

Spencer shook himself and took the controls again. He didn't try to jerk the ship out of its tumble. There was still too much energy from the explosion, too much debris being carried along with them. He brought it around gently, didn't bother with thrusters, let the shockwave do the work.

"Forty seconds," Ryan said, no longer shouting. One by one the alarms shut off; from the corner of his eyes Spencer saw his hands moving rapidly over the display.

"Brendon," Spencer said.

No answer.

Spencer raised his voice: "Brendon!"

" _Trying_ ," Brendon snapped. He sounded distracted and a little dazed, but he was answering, at least. He was still there. "Something fucking—shit, something from the blast hit the gun tower, it won't fucking _fire_."

Spencer didn't wait any longer. There was no space, no safe place to create a distortion and definitely no reliable way to calculate a field, but he fired up the mag drive and said, "Get us a fucking coordinate out of here."

"This close to the planet—"

This close to a planet they were in the planet's gravitational field and could never make an accurate jump. "Do it anyway," Spencer said.

"On it," Ryan said. The ship's computer beeped obligingly. "Spencer—twenty seconds." Something jolted the ship, a solid impact that rattled Spencer's teeth. "They're firing."

"No shit?"

"Got it."

"Spence, the mag drive—"

A warning on Spencer's display filled in the rest: there was no power getting to the mag drive.

"Walker!" Spencer shouted. He jerked the ship quickly to one side to dodge a tumbling piece of wreckage. Another volley of projectiles rained down on the ship. "Fucking hell, Brendon, get out of the tower if you can. Walker, the reactor?" But that didn't make sense; the ship still had power, he still had control, it was just the drive that wasn't responding.

"It's not the reactor," Jon said. His voice was tinny and breathless over the comm. He sounded very far away, like he was shouting at the microphone from across the engine room. "Same shit that hit the gun tower hit the accel ring. It's bent, there's nothing getting from the ring to the web."

Spencer didn't know how the hell Jon had figured all that out stuck down in the engine room, but as an explanation it made perfect sense and fit what the ship was telling him. "Fuck. We're gonna have to—"

There was no clear course out of the wreckage of the settler. Spencer could see it with his eyes, with the instrument outputs, there was just _no way_ to race the fuck out of here, not with this ship. It was all he could do just to keep from smashing into the burning, melted, unpredictably spinning pieces of the destroyed settler. It was a churning mess of metal and light all around them, completely silently except for the occasional impacts, creaking and clanging eerily as debris struck the ship.

"Intercept," Ryan said. His voice had no emotion in it at all. Spencer knew him well enough to know that meant Ryan agreed they were fucked.

The patrols were ten times more maneuverable and better protected against solid-body impacts. One of them raced by, darting carelessly through the ruin before turning sharply to face them, and the other fixed itself in a spot just behind them. It was a move Spencer had seen countless times before. Hell, it was a move Spencer had _performed_ countless times before. It worked exactly the same with patrols as it had with fighters.

They had no railgun and no mag drive, and they were caught in a twin trap between two faster, stronger, armed ships.

"Fuck," Spencer said, so quietly only Ryan could hear him.

Ryan's hands stilled over the display. There was no sound at all. The patrol ahead of them was waiting, visible and apparently unconcerned by the wreckage around them.

"Spencer," Jon said suddenly. "Jump."

Spencer blinked in surprise, then glared at the comm speaker. "The fuck? The mag drive's—"

"Not the mag drive. The jump drive."

"But—" Spencer broke off to maneuver the ship again, dodging between two charred sections of the settler. The patrols followed easily but didn't come any closer. They were probably broadcasting another warning or ultimatum. Spencer was glad Ryan had that channel silenced.

"Power's getting from the sphere to the web," Jon said. "It's ready to go. We just need coordinates."

Spencer looked at Ryan, who met his gaze wide-eyed. "Do it," he said.

Ryan's hands were already at work before he looked away. "I don't know, with the planet's gravity, but we could try—"

"Do it," Spencer said.

"But I don't—"

"Coordinates, Ry." The patrols were creeping closer. When they fired next, it wouldn't be in warning. It wouldn't be projectiles that caused surface damage.

"It might be—"

"Ryan." Spencer waited until Ryan looked at him. "Give us a destination."

Ryan nodded once and glanced down at his display. "Done."

"Okay?" Spencer said, which was stupid, because if they weren't, the antimatter sphere would blow and take the planet with it, and if they were, well, a jump didn't feel like anything at all.

He punched in the command to jump and closed his eyes.


	3. Chapter 3

**iii.**

The ship was quiet.

Not quiet, Jon realized. Silent. Completely, utterly silent. There was no low, steady hum of engines, no soft hissing of the ventilation system, no distant drips in the water reclamation pipes. There was nothing.

"Shit," Brendon said. Jon jumped. He hadn't even heard Brendon coming down to the engine room, but his voice was loud and close. "Not again."

There was no light either. If there were emergency lights they hadn't kicked on automatically, and Jon could see nothing except absolute darkness. He blinked rapidly several times, his eyes straining, and held his breath. No light, no sound except for Brendon's breath beside him. Brendon sounded much too calm. Jon's lungs were starting to hurt.

"Jon? You okay?"

Something touched his arm, and Jon jerked away, let out his breath in a loud _whoosh_. He moved away so quickly he knocked his hand into something hard and metallic.

"Hey, hey, it's just me," Brendon said. He touched Jon's arm again and didn't move his hand away. "You okay? Say something, Jon."

Brendon. Engine room. Jump drive. Dead ship. The ship was dead.

"Fuck," he said.

Brendon laughed. "Uh, yeah. Are you okay, seriously?"

"Sorry," Jon gasped. "Sorry, sorry."

"Okay," Brendon said. He was so close Jon could feel his breath on his cheek. "It's okay. This happens all the time."

"Stupid fucking ship," Jon said. He rubbed a hand over his face and exhaled shakily. Inhaled again. Exhaled. Two breaths, that wasn't so bad. Two breaths didn't use much air.

"You don't have to count your breaths," Brendon said. "We've got time. We've got air. And it'll be hard for us to fix the stupid fucking ship if you're freaking out."

"Right," Jon said. When he put it like that, it made sense. "We need—"

Light flared overhead, a bright square through the hatch into the ceiling. There were heavy footsteps pounding above and Spencer was saying, "I thought you fixed this fucking thing."

"Shut up," Brendon said. "Did it work?"

Spencer slid down the ladder and twisted the light around to point it first at Brendon, then at Jon, then at the floor. His face was pale and shone with a trace of sweat. "Yeah," he said. "It worked."

It took Jon a moment to remember what they were talking about. "It did?"

Spencer's face broke into a wide smile. "It really fucking did. How do you think we didn't get blasted to pieces? It worked."

"We jumped," Jon said, not quite believing it. It shouldn't have worked. He'd hooked up the jump drive as a last resort. He hadn't expected it to work at all. He turned to look at the black sphere hidden amongst the cables and conduits and tried to recall what he had done, to figure out why it worked and why it had blasted the rest of the power in the process. "Holy shit," he said, mostly to himself. "Where are we?"

"I have no idea," Spencer admitted. "Ryan can't—"

"Ryan can't verify our position until you get the ship running again," Ryan's voice rang from somewhere overhead. It echoed weirdly in the cargo bay. "I thought you fixed this."

"We know, asshole," Spencer said. "Shut up and go back to the cockpit and keep an eye out for anything weird."

Ryan mumbled something that sounded like, "Who died and put you in charge?" But there were retreating footsteps on metal.

"I thought we fixed it too," Jon said sheepishly. "Can I have—" Spencer handed him the light before he even reached for it. "I think it's... Well, okay, something is shorting and interrupting the main conduit, because if the reactor was gone we'd be gone too, but it's not until after the circuit's closed, which means..." Jon turned away and began to check things. A short and a power interruption at the precise second the jump drive kicked in: that wasn't a coincidence, that was a problem. A problem he could fix. He took a few deep breaths and felt himself calming down, his mind focusing. The drive wasn't supposed to draw power from anything else, that's not how they worked, but something was draining and that meant he'd made a mistake...

"Does he always talk to himself while he works?" Spencer asked.

"All the time," Brendon said. "It's pretty funny. Sometimes he sings parts lists and maintenance routines to himself too."

Jon looked up distractedly. Brendon was grinning and Spencer looked amused. "Do what? I do? No, I don't."

"Yes, you do," Brendon said. "But it's okay. I don't mind."

"I don't—oh, never mind," Jon said. "Give me that—no, not that one, the—"

Brendon grinned wider and began passing tools to Jon. Spencer watched for a moment, his expression thoughtful, then fell into place beside Jon and began testing connections and junctions.

Every day, Jon thought. They'd done this every day for _weeks_. They'd found themselves in a dark, silent ship, no power and no propulsion and no life support, and they'd had to fix it. Every fucking day. Jon shuddered.

"Um, how long..." He couldn't quite finish the question.

"Eight, nine hours," Spencer answered. "Plenty of time."

Jon did not count his breaths. He had more important things to do.

It took them about two hours to find the problem. It was stupidly simple: a rusted contact and busted capacitor, easy enough to replace. It should never have gotten so worn down in the first place.

"Who the fuck modifies a ship with a jump drive using the shittiest parts on the market?" Jon asked, cursing roundly as he snagged his finger on a sharp edge and drew blood. "Stupid fucking idiot had no fucking idea..." He sucked on his finger and scowled at Spencer. "Where did you get this piece of shit, anyway? You have the worst fucking taste in ships."

Brendon snorted back a laugh, and Spencer raised an eyebrow. "Sorry," he said mildly. "I didn't have time to do a thorough inspection."

"You should _make_ time," Jon began, preparing to launch into a truly impressive lecture, but Brendon was full-on laughing then and Spencer had joined him. Jon was so stunned by the sight of Spencer laughing he gaped for a few seconds before asking, "What? You're flying around in a ship that's got more problems than a fucking colony of—"

"A ship I _stole_ ," Spencer said, still laughing. "I didn't pay money for it, Walker, because I stole it out of the Alliance impound station orbiting Corvus after we crashed—"

" _We_?" Brendon interjected.

"—our last one. I was kind of in a hurry to pick the first one I could fly, what with the guards shooting at us and everything."

Jon stared for a second, then laughed along with them. "Fuck. I should have guessed. Well, next time you steal a ship, I'm coming with you to make sure you steal a better one." He snapped the replacement capacitor into place and sat back on his heels. "Okay, I think we're good now."

"It's about time," Spencer said, then shouted, "Ryan!"

"It's about time," Ryan shouted back. "By the way, I let Clover out. She tried to claw my face off, but she's fine."

Jon let out a relieved laugh.

"Fire it up, Ryan," Spencer said.

"Yeah, yeah." Ryan's footsteps retreated overhead.

There was a long silence—Jon wasn't the only one holding his breath—and it ended abruptly with the roar of the ship coming to life with rumbling, rattling activity. Cables sparked and the ventilation system began to hiss.

Brendon whooped and threw his arms around Jon and kissed him on the cheek. "It worked!"

Jon hugged him back. "Yeah, well, I didn't feel like suffocating to death today."

"Usually it takes Spencer four or five tries to get it running again," Brendon said. Spencer rolled his eyes, and Brendon stuck his tongue out. "He's just jealous because it was my idea to bring you on board."

"Um, guys?" Ryan's voice crackled over the comm.

Spencer hit a button. "What is it?"

"I think you should see this."

"What is it?"

"Get up here, Spence. It's fucking _weird_." Ryan sounded nervous, maybe a little scared, and Spencer hurried up the ladder. Jon and Brendon followed. They crowded into cockpit, where Ryan was sitting in the pilot's chair, his hands resting lightly on the controls. Spencer sat in the navigator's chair, and Brendon and Jon stood behind them.

"What are they?" Brendon whispered, craning his head up to look out the window. "Are they—"

With a start Jon realized the faint blue glow filling the room wasn't coming from the lights or instrument panel.

"Alive," Ryan breathed.

Spencer asked, "Do you think so?"

"They're alive," Ryan said insistently. "They just _appeared_. There was nothing, the whole time we were dead, nothing out there at all. But as soon as the power came up, they were _here_."

Jon had never seen anything like it before. The—they were _things_ , he didn't have a better word for them—they were floating through space around the ship, flowing and luminous and translucent. He couldn't tell how big they were or how far away; distant, he thought, and unimaginably massive. They were somehow both solid and wispy, like cords of glass thousands of miles long. Light rolled along their lengths, like signals in an optical cable, not exactly random but in no pattern Jon could recognize either. They floating like a school of fish toward some unknown destination.

Ryan was right. They were alive. Jon didn't know how he was so certain, but they were _alive_.

Jon leaned forward for a better look, pressed close to Brendon's back. "What are they?"

"They're impossible," Spencer whispered. There was something in his voice that made Jon look away from the creatures, glance at his face. Spencer was smiling and his eyes were wide, his mouth open slightly and his skin aglow with the bluish cast from the creatures. "They're _impossible_ ," he said again, something bright and giddy rising like laughter in his voice. "I mean, there are rumors, people tell stories, but—"

"I thought they were lies," said Brendon. "I thought—just stories."

Ryan leaned forward, almost sprawling across the panel for a better view. "We all did," he said. "Are they—what do you think they're doing? Those lights."

"Talking," Spencer said.

Brendon shook his head; his hair brushed against Jon's face. "Singing."

Ryan twisted around to look at Brendon, his expression thoughtful, then he sat back in his chair to gaze out the window again. The hum of the engines around them, the quiet rhythm of their breathing, Ryan's hands on the instruments, and it was impossible, what Brendon said. There was no noise in space, no way for sound to travel, everybody knew that. But he stared at the lights thrumming along the length of the creatures, some slow and pulsing, others racing in rapid flickers, and Jon thought—it was impossible—he thought he could hear them, a distant vibration in his ears and neck and spine, like music through walls so thick nothing escapes but the feeling.

"There are so many of them," Ryan said quietly.

"Yeah," Jon breathed. He felt Brendon shiver, but he didn't move away.

He didn't know how long they watched the creatures moving past. It might have been minutes, it might have been hours. He had some vague feeling that he was growing tired standing in the cockpit half-leaning against Brendon, his chin on Brendon's shoulder, uncomfortably warm and closer than he was used to being with anyone, even in so casual a touch. But Brendon was remarkably still and after a while none of them said anything at all.

They must be moving unimaginably fast, Jon thought, amazed, so much faster than any ship could manage, especially any ship as big as they were. Fast, but so very graceful. The swarm of creatures flowed steadily away, their course unwavering, until they were little more than a fading, bluish smear of light in the distance.

The cockpit was dark; Ryan hadn't switched on the lights after the power came back. When the creatures were so far away they might be just another star, just another speck of light, Ryan sighed softly. "I need to verify our position," he said.

He wasn't speaking loudly, but his voice jarred the silence and Jon felt, for an instant, irrationally angry. But it faded quickly into a strange, muted melancholy. They were impossible creatures, the stuff of wild stories and outrageous legends, and he might never see them again.

Brendon made a small noise, the broken beginning of a word, and he moved slightly.

Jon stepped away. "We should give them a name," he said, without really thinking about it.

Brendon turned to look at him. "Don't they have a name? Lots of names, actually."

Jon shrugged. Ryan was at work again, frowning to himself as he calculated their position, and Spencer was checking over the ship's systems, but he could tell they were listening. "Yeah, they have lots of names," he said. "It's like every planet that has stories, every fleet that sees them—"

"They all have their own names," Brendon finished. He look thoughtful for a moment, then he smiled. "You're right. We should. A name that's just ours."

"Like what?" Spencer asked, looking up at them.

"Don't know yet," Brendon said. "We'll think of something."

Spencer grinned back at him, and for a second they both looked so young and cheerful, all the tension of worry and exhaustion smoothed from their faces, like in that moment they forgot they were traveling through space in an unreliable ship, on the run from the Alliance and no safe place to go. Jon wanted to stare so he looked away, shuffled backward a few steps, and said, "I'm gonna go make things, well, still work."

Spencer looked at him, still grinning, and said, "Damn straight. That's what we're paying you for, space mechanic."

Jon laughed. "That's the thanks I get for saving your asses back there?"

Spencer's smile vanished in a blink. He looked stricken. "I didn't—that's not what I— _yes_ , I mean, you did and—"

"Spence, that's not what he meant," Ryan said.

It took Jon a moment, but understanding dawned and he felt a sharp stab of guilt. "Oh, god, no. Yes. I didn't mean—they would have blasted us to piece if you weren't flying this thing, no matter what I did with the drives, I was just..." Jon rubbed his hand over his face. "Joking," he finished lamely. Stupid fucking joke, Walker, he thought.

Spencer didn't answer, and as the silence grew longer and more awkward Brendon finally said, "You _both_ saved our asses. But me and Ryan, we just got to be the damsels in the distress. I don't think that's fair."

"Hey," Ryan said. "I'm not a damsel in distress."

Brendon ruffled Ryan's hair, ignoring Ryan's annoyed protest, and said, "Come on, Walker. Let's go fix things with manly tools in our manly engine room while these two figure out where the hell we are."

They were barely down the ladder when Brendon said, "So. You kind of freaked out there when we lost power."

Jon picked up a tool and didn't turn to look at Brendon. "Not a big fan of being adrift in space," he said with a shrug. "It's a quirk I have."

He heard Brendon moving around behind him, the quiet noises of tools on metal, and he thought that was it. A few minutes later, however, Brendon spoke again, "It's happened to you before?"

"It's happened to you guys lots of times," Jon pointed out. "That's why I'm here, isn't it?"

"Yeah, but that's us," Brendon said. "We're used to it by now."

Jon didn't think that was something you ever really got used to, but he was the one who'd panicked, not them. "It's different on a small ship," he said.

Brendon said, "Less time to suffocate."

Jon nodded. Something sparked in front of him, and he flinched at the stinging burns on his fingers. He cursed himself silently. He needed to pay closer attention. Brendon didn't say anything else, didn't push, but Jon said, "It was a Parish cruiser, a few years ago. Two thousand passengers. We were going through Lago—or what's left of it."

Behind him Brendon was quiet, no longer working.

Jon swallowed before he went on. "Mostly refugees but there were some—but some other people too." It was better not to say it out loud, he thought. He might be on a stolen ship piloted by an Alliance deserter, but that didn't mean it was safe. That didn't mean they would understand. "You know the Alliance still patrols Lago? We all thought, no way they'd still care about what's there, there's nothing fucking left except useless rock. But there were patrols, and we were attacked and—have you seen it?"

"No."

"Well, it's—you think, flying through it, you think you should be able to recognize parts of it." Jon closed his eyes briefly and remembered. Even the star had looked wrong, sickly and pale, nothing like the brilliant sun he remember from his childhood. And three planets, the entire system, reduced to nothing more than rubble. "Some of it, the chunks are as big as moons, the surface is intact and there are roads, cities still visible."

"You're from Lago?" Brendon asked.

"Yeah." Jon took a deep breath and turned around, sat down across from Brendon, a pile of tools and parts between them.

Brendon was sitting cross-legged with his elbows resting on his knees, his dark eyes wide and sad. "You must've been really little."

"Yeah," Jon said again. "Six. Almost seven, I guess. It's—most of it's a blur, you know? Mostly I remember everything that happened right before. There was a parade. There was a fucking parade, can you believe that?"

Brendon looked down, and his voice was small when he said, "Yeah?"

"The Chancellor was there. The Chancellor himself, his whole fucking family and half the fucking fleet, and I remember everybody thought it would be okay." There had been celebrations in the streets, parties at night, fireworks and songs. Some parts of it were shockingly clear in his mind, as though they happened yesterday, and others were no more than impressions. "My parents were really happy. Everybody was. We went to the parade. It was right through the middle of the fucking city, the provincial governor was there shaking the Chancellor's hand and everything. My dad put me up on his shoulders, and I remember when the cars went past—the Chancellor and his wife and their kids, I remember thinking, that looks like fun, riding in a parade. The kids were waving and smiling and that's what I thought. That would be fun. And then, a few days later—I guess it was a few weeks. I don't know."

The Alliance had decided to make an example of the Lago system: they had demonstrated their newest weapon, one capable of obliterating an entire planet in a long, slow, painful series of attacks and blasts. They'd never used the weapon before Lago and, as far as Jon knew, they hadn't used it since.

Jon's mother and brothers had died in the initial attack, his father from sickness on a refugee ship months later. Some people on the ship adopted Jon: hard, angry fighters, not one of them surprised that the Chancellor had broken the treaty, not one of them hopeful that things would ever change. They must have been making plans, trying to form a rebellion, something, but Jon only remembered one old man telling him to stop crying, it wouldn't do any good, he could never go home.

He hadn't really believed it, not completely, until he was on that Parish cruiser fifteen years later, staring through the windows at millions and millions of miles of debris, the broken remains of his home planet.

Brendon touched his shoulder, and Jon started; he hadn't noticed Brendon moving to sit beside him. Brendon put his arm around Jon's shoulder. It was a little awkward, a little hesitant, but Jon leaned gratefully into him and tried to remember the last time somebody had comforted him, or the last time he'd ever said enough to let on that he might want it. He didn't want to think about why he was sitting here telling Brendon his life story.

"Was that the first time you went back?" Brendon asked, after a few minutes. "On the Parish?"

Jon nodded. "Yeah. We were just passing through. Just a shortcut. Nobody knew there were patrols."

"You were attacked?"

"The ship was banged up really bad. Crippled, really, most of the main systems shot to hell."

"But not destroyed," Brendon said. He squeezed Jon's shoulders, and Jon was glad he didn't have to explain that part. Not destroyed, no. That would have been the merciful thing to do.

"Life support failed," Jon said.

Brendon inhaled sharply. "Two thousand people?"

"At first. There were some - not the refugees. The refugees weren't armed, they didn't have anything. But the others." Rebels. Freedom fighters. Men and women he'd thought of as friends, because that kind of friendship meant a gun in your hand and food in your stomach. He still thought of them as _the others_ , but he knew it was a lie, felt it in every bone. He'd been one of them. He'd even considered going along when they first proposed killing the refugees, preserving what air was left for themselves. He'd considered it. "I didn't," he said quietly, to himself. "I didn't go along with them."

"Go along with what?" Brendon asked. Then, a beat later, "Oh. _Oh._ God, Jon. How did you—what did you do?"

Jon closed his eyes. "I hid," he said. "Mechanics knows all the best hiding places. So do cats."

"You mean Clover?"

"Yeah," Jon said. "Yeah. I guess she belonged to one of the refugees. I don't know. But she found my hiding place, and she—we stayed there."

He didn't know how long it was. He told Brendon in short, halting sentences, he didn't know how long it took, he didn't know how long they were adrift. There was no sense of the passage of time in the dark, hot conduit he found, nothing except the way the air grew ever more dank and breathing grew ever more difficult. He heard the others moving in the corridors sometimes, their boots heavy on the metal floors, and he heard distant shots, distant screams.

But those grew fewer and fewer, and much of the time there was no sound at all, nothing except Clover panting quietly beside him, a tiny, warm, soft body in the darkness, either too scared or too weak to protest when he clung to her. He hadn't even known what she looked like until afterward, when the non-commissioned salvage ship found them and he crawled out into the light. There were only twenty of them left—twenty-one counting Clover, and weren't the others surprised to see him there, still alive, hugging a sick cat like a little kid with a blanket—and the salvage crew didn't say anything about the bodies, just herded the survivors off the ship, threw all of them in the brig together, and dumped them at the next station.

Jon fell silent. Brendon didn't say anything, just turned and pulled Jon into a hug and held on tight for a minute.

"Thanks," Jon said roughly, his voice muffled against Brendon's shoulder.

"Thank you for telling me," Brendon said. He let go, and Jon moved away reluctantly.

"So I'm from Lago, and Spencer and Ryan are from Nuevo Montenegro." Jon cleared his throat. "What about you? Are you one of the wandering dispossessed too?"

Brendon made a sound like a sharp, bitter laugh. "No," he said. He turned his back to Jon. "Not me. My home planet's still out there. I couldn't be that lucky."

Before Jon could ask what he meant, Brendon was climbing up the ladder and out of the engine room.

-

"Do you want the good news or the bad news first?"

"Bad," Spencer said automatically.

Ryan flashed him a quick grin. "You're so predictable. I have no idea where we are."

Spencer raised his eyebrows. "None?"

"None whatsoever," Ryan said cheerfully.

Spencer stared at him. "We're lost?"

"I wouldn't say _lost_ , exactly," Ryan hedged, toying with the end of his scarf. "Without an initial position I can't identify any of the visible stars, and without star identities we're starting from zero, but there are still stars we can fix and there's a planetary system about a half a parsec away. It's just that the coordinates in the computer, were wrong, or the tensor solution was wrong, or the planet's gravity field threw us farther off than I thought it would, or the web is damaged, or the drive didn't have enough power, or—"

"In other words," Spencer interrupted, "we're lost."

"I tried to warn you," Ryan pointed out. "You went ahead with the jump anyway."

"Only because I didn't want to die," Spencer retorted. He scanned over the readings on the display. The computer was twisting itself in knots trying to find any recognizable set of stars, but it wasn't picking up much of anything else either. No propulsion signatures, no radio signals, no residual jump tracks. As far as Spencer could tell, they were completely alone. He found he could breathe a little bit easier. "So what's the good news?"

"Well," Ryan said, looking down at his display again as his fingers tapped through a sequence of commands, "at least we didn't jump into the middle of a star."

"Ryan."

"Hmm?"

"That's the good news?"

"I think it's good news," Ryan said, blinking innocently at him.

"What's good news?" Jon came into the cockpit behind them and rested his elbows on the back Ryan's chair. "We could really use some."

"We're lost," Spencer said.

"We're alive," Ryan said.

"Huh," Jon said. "Yeah, I guess one of those is good news."

"It's the one that matters," Ryan said, unconcerned. "We won't be lost for long."

"What's the plan?" Jon asked.

"Three jumps in local space to get triangulation on the visible stars, which should be enough to tell us where we are, and if there's a workable planet or moon in the nearest system we can put down and make repairs." Ryan looked at Spencer. "Right?"

"Why are you asking me?" Spencer said. "You want to be the captain, you can be the captain. I'll even get you a hat if you want."

"No thanks," Ryan said airily.

Spencer smiled a little, then turned to ask Jon, "Will we be able to land if we find a surface?"

Jon looked past him out the window and ran his hand over the back of his neck. "As far as I can tell the thrusters and stabilizers weren't affected by the explosion, but there could be damage I can't see from in here." He shrugged. "I think we can land, but I don't know how smoothly. And if you're looking at a planet with more than, say, about one-point-five g, I'd say we shouldn't risk it."

"Okay," Spencer said. "Let's just hope we can find a safe place to set down. I hope you weren't in a hurry to get anywhere."

"Not me, man," Jon said with a smile. "I don't mind being lost in space for a while."

After Jon left the cockpit, Spencer looked up and saw Ryan watching him with a small smile on his lips.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"What?"

Ryan only smiled.

"Jon knows what he's doing," Spencer said. "He's good with machines."

"Among other things," Ryan said cryptically.

Spencer thought about asking what he meant, but that felt like too much effort so he settled for slumping down in his chair and watching Ryan. Ryan worked quickly setting up the calculations for the jumps; the three metal fingers of his right hand clicked quietly on the display. The buttons at the wrists of his shirt were open, and he wasn't wearing gloves.

Spencer sat upright slowly, his heart hammering painfully in his chest, but before he could speak Ryan said, "He's already figured it out, Spence." He didn't look up from what he was doing.

"Did he say something?"

Ryan shrugged. "Not yet. But you said it yourself: he's good with machines."

Spencer swallowed anxiously but he didn't say anything. There was nothing to say that he hadn't already said a thousand times before. And he was too tired now anyway: he hadn't slept since before they'd picked up the distress signal, what felt like an impossible number of hours ago.

Neither of them spoke until a few minutes later when Ryan said, "Ready to jump."

They made three jumps without any trouble, and after each one the ship's computer registered the changes in relative positions of visible stars to calculate their position. When Ryan announced that they had enough information to make the calculation, they made another jump into the orbit of the nearest star.

"Oh," Ryan said, moments after they had jumped. He was looking at his display with wide eyes. "We're, um, holy shit. We're pretty far from just about everything right now. I didn't even know a jump drive could make it that far in a single jump."

Alliance space was spread out along a long axis of star systems in one arm of the galaxy, with the Inner and Outer Rings of stars concentrated at the center and all the other worlds smeared out in a long, narrow disc around them. Nearly all other populated worlds were on the fringe of that elongated area. Where they were now was hundreds of light years outside that region, in a part of space where, according to their database, the stars had been named but no permanent colonies had ever been established.

Spencer leaned over to for a closer look. "Tharsis system? I've never heard of it."

"It's named after a place on Old Mars," Brendon said. He and Jon had joined them in the cockpit when they jumped into the system. Brendon was leaning on the back of Ryan's chair, gazing through the window at the nearest planet, visible to the naked eye as no more than a small disc of reddish light in the distance but growing quickly. "Maybe because that planet kind of looks like it? I don't know. I've never heard of it either."

"There's nothing in the database except basic information," Ryan said. "Pre-Alliance explorers, I think. Nobody's been here for a long time."

The system had five planets: two gas giants, deep red and sickly green in color with an asteroid belt between them, and three smaller, rocky worlds. One of the smaller planets was too close to the star for it to be anything other than boiling hot, and another, according to the ancient exploration report, was completely covered in toxic black clouds.

But the third looked like it might be a place they could set down for a little while. Spencer set a course and let the ship take them in slowly. The final approach took a few long, boring hours, and Brendon and Jon both went to get some sleep. Spencer told Ryan he could as well, but Ryan only looked at him and started reading everything he could find the database about the planet, Tharsis II. There was no information in the report about the atmosphere except that it had one, but the gravity and temperature were reasonable. The surface was brownish-red and, as far as Spencer could see as they drew closer, completely barren.

The only picture of Old Mars Spencer had ever seen was a fanciful painting of the First System in an old church on Nuevo Montenegro, an abandoned building a few streets away from the housing block where he and Ryan had grown up. Like everything else he knew about the First System mythology, Spencer assumed the painting owed more to wishful thinking and wild imagination than historical fact. But Brendon was right: the planet did look like Old Mars, and the similarity sent a shiver down Spencer's spine.

When they finally reached the planet, Spencer settled into orbit to look for a place to land while Jon checked the landing system again. The ship was designed to land on planet surfaces without a spaceport—useful for trading with minor moons and more primitive colonies—but Spencer was all too aware of that that he'd never actually done so with this ship. So he was inexperienced, exhausted, flying a damaged ship, and more than a little bit creeped out by the aloneness he'd found reassuring when they'd first jumped away from the Alliance patrols. Excellent conditions for landing on an unfamiliar planet so far from anything he couldn't even figure out how they'd gotten here, much less how they were going to get back.

Brendon squeezed his shoulder reassuringly. "Don't worry," he said. "You'll be fine."

Spencer took a deep breath. They were over the daylight side of the planet now, and the topography below looked about as flat as they were going to find. "Well," he said, "here we go."

The landing was definitely rough—they were all going to have extra bruises from their restraints—and the planet's surface not nearly as flat as the radar had led him to believe, but they made it down in one piece. Spencer leveled the ship and hoped the ground was steady, and he opened the filters to get a reading on the atmosphere. The light through the window was weirdly orange and the ground outside was a jagged, forbidding landscape of rocks and canyons. Spencer had landed into the planet's rotation, and above the horizon directly in front of them there was a brilliant green star he realized after a second must be the neighboring gas giant.

"So what's the weather like on Tharsis II?" Brendon asked. He leaned over Spencer's shoulder to read the atmospheric data. "Huh. Twenty-five/seventy plus inerts, point-nine g, radiation and air temp on the warm side but not even close to lethal. Are we sure nobody lives here?"

They hadn't detected any sign of civilization around this planet or any of the others in the system. But there could be a lot of reasons a seemingly viable planet wasn't colonized, starting with the fact that it was so far away from the most densely population regions of space.

Spencer said, "Take a suit and a shield just in case."

"I—oh." Brendon looked surprised and delighted. "Yeah. Definitely. Of course."

Spencer knew he could order Brendon to stay on board, even though there was nothing Brendon loved more than exploring new planets. He could make the argument that it was safer to not go wandering around, and he would be right. They knew nothing about this place. But he was tired and they were on solid ground for the first time in months and he didn't even want to try.

"And be careful," Spencer added.

"I'll go with you," Jon said. He was leaning in the cockpit doorway, and the look in his eyes as he stared out the window at the brilliant orange light was—it was almost _hungry_ , Spencer thought.

Brendon saw it too, because he asked, "How long has it been since you were on a planet?"

Jon didn't look at any of them. "A while," he said after a moment.

Spencer gave the last few commands to power down the ship to its resting state. "Take a light too, but try not to stay out past sunset. Ryan and I will—"

"Sleep," Ryan said. When Spencer looked at him, he shrugged. "You're so exhausted right now you wouldn't even be able to hold a maglathe, much less actually fix anything."

"Yeah," Spencer sighed, and Ryan laughed. "What?"

"Okay, now I know you're half asleep already, because you didn't even try to argue."

Brendon laughed too, and grabbed Jon's hand to tug him out of the cockpit. "Sure, guys. We'll let you _sleep_." He winked. "Come on, Walker. We've got a planet to explore."

Spencer made himself make sure there was no problem with the airlock, the ship was stable, and Brendon and Jon took all the right gear with them. But when they were finally outside, two shimmering silhouettes walking away from the ship in the orange sunlight, he closed his eyes, exhaled slowly, and leaned against the wall outside the cabin.

He felt Ryan's fingers close around his wrist first, then the slow, familiar pressure of Ryan leaning against him, wrapping one around his waist and sliding one leg between Spencer's. Spencer lifted his chin as Ryan nuzzled against his neck and pressed a line of soft kisses along his collarbone. "I thought we were going to sleep," Spencer said. He tugged Ryan's shirt to untuck it and slipped both hands underneath at the back.

"We are going to sleep," Ryan murmured, his mouth warm against Spencer's skin. Then suddenly he was gone. Ryan's fingers closed around his wrist, his grip always so much stronger than Spencer expected.

Spencer opened his eyes and let Ryan drag him into the cabin, push him into the lower bunk and crawl in beside him.

"I'm really glad," Ryan said between kisses, "we didn't die this time."

Spencer started to answer, but his reply turned into a yawn and he was asleep before he could say anything.

-

They'd been walking for about fifteen minutes when Jon stopped. He turned to face the sun and closed his eyes. It was hot enough that there was already sweat dripping down his skin, but the air was bone-dry and there was a light, steady wind in his face. The wind whispered over the rocks but otherwise there was no sound except for their own footsteps and their own breathing. He felt lightheaded and giddy, like he could float away if it weren't for the pack on his back and boots on his feet.

Brendon's boots crunched on the ground as he came closer. He didn't say anything at first, but after a moment he asked, "How long has it been?"

Jon knew what he was asking: how long since he'd stood on solid ground. "Ten years," he said.

He opened his eyes. Brendon was standing a few feet away, one hand shielding his eyes. Behind him the landscape stretched empty for as far as Jon could see; the green planet still glowed like a gem above the horizon. The sunlight was warm and diffuse but still incredibly bright for eyes used to the constant dimness of a ship's interior.

"Not since I left Pacifica IV," Jon added.

Brendon let out a low whistle. "Wow."

The sky on Pacifica IV was so choked with smoke and smog it was impossible to see the stars or the planet's twin moons, and the rain was so acidic that anybody caught outside a shelter during one of the frequent storms didn't have much chance of surviving. No sunlight that reached the surface, no water that wasn't gray and muddy, no air that didn't taste like rust, no ground that hadn't been built up with dozens of layers of dreary, dripping buildings and basements. Jon had spent his first week on the ship after leaving just trying to learn how to breathe again.

"Yeah," Jon said. He squinted at Brendon and tried to smile. "This is a little bit nicer."

He started walking again, and Brendon fell into step beside him. They didn't have any destination in mind as they picked their way slowly over the rugged, rocky terrain. Jon was panting before long, and sweat was streaming down his face. The air was so dry his lips and throat felt chapped. He had water in his pack, but he didn't want to stop. Walking, stretching his legs, straining his muscles on the steep slopes and uneven rocks, it felt _fantastic_.

Jon stopped to rest and looked back toward the ship. It was a boxy, ugly shape in the distance; they'd come a lot farther than he thought. Brendon stopped beside him and rested his hands on his knees, breathing heavily. Jon reached into his pack for the water pouch and passed it to Brendon first.

"How did you know where the star name came from?" Jon asked. Tharsis was still well above the horizon, and the planet turned slowly so it would be hours before sunset. "I mean, I don't know anything about Old Mars except that there was a planet called Old Mars in the First System."

Brendon wiped his mouth and handed the water back. "I don't know," he said with a shrug. "I heard it somewhere, I guess." He wasn't looking at Jon, but after a second he continued, "It wasn't called Old Mars. It was just called Mars. It's only old now because there was also a new one, but that's gone too. Or not gone, really, but nobody lives there anymore. It's near Riga and before the Alliance... Well. Ancient history."

He walked a few steps away, but he hadn't gone ten feet before he stopped again. "Jon! Jon, look at this." Brendon crouched down for a closer look at something on the ground and waved Jon over.

"What is it?"

To Jon it looked like a rock the same as all the other rocks around, but Brendon rolled it over with a grunt and said, "Look."

Jon knelt beside Brendon and reached to touch the rock. Set in the surface was the imprint of a perfect fossilized leaf about the size of his hand. "Oh. Oh, wow. That's pretty cool."

"There used to be something alive here," Brendon said quietly, almost reverently. "I guess, this much oxygen in the atmosphere it's obvious, but..." Brendon looked at him and grinned. "This planet used to have _trees_."

Now that they'd seen the first fossil, it was easy for them to find others. They hurried eagerly along, turning over stones and examining them. They found more leaves like the first, and what looked like fronds of a palm, and several smaller, finer fossils that might have been grass. It was as though an entire swamp or marsh had been drained and compressed into the dull red rock. Jon sat back on his heels and tried to imagine what the planet had looked like then, so many millions of years ago.

"Huh. What's this?" Brendon was leaning over a crack in the rock and reaching down with one hand. They were on a narrow sliver of land between two deep fissures; the entire landscape was slashed with similar features. Some of them were so deep the bottoms were hidden in murky reddish shadows.

"Careful," Jon called out.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm just—" Brendon twisted around to reach further. "I'm just trying to—oh shit." His foot slipped out from under him and he toppled over. He threw both arms out to catch himself, but his hands grasped uselessly on the stone and he slid downward, into the crack.

Jon was moving before Brendon even fell, but he wasn't fast enough to catch him. He fell to his knees at the edge of the fissure and shouted, "Brendon! Brendon, where the fuck—"

"I'm right here."

Jon blinked. The fissure was in shadow, but as his eyes adjusted he saw Brendon only about ten feet below him, sitting on the ground and looking around. He was on a ledge underneath some kind of overhang, and he waved up at Jon and rubbed his elbow gently. "Hi," Brendon said brightly. "I fell. My ass hurts."

Jon laughed. "You're an idiot, I swear. Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine." Brendon stood up and turned in a circle. "Whoa."

"What?"

Instead of answering, Brendon walked a few steps, far enough to move him out of Jon's sight. Jon scowled and examined where Brendon had fallen in. It wasn't a sharp drop-off, more of a steep slope, but not so steep he wouldn't be able to climb back out.

If he didn't wander away and get lost. "Hey," Jon began.

"Um, Jon?" Brendon's voice echoed below him, surprisingly far away.

Jon felt a shiver of worry. "What is it?"

"Can you get down here?"

"Are you hurt?"

"No," Brendon said after a moment. "No, it's not that. It's just... I think you should see this."

"See what?" But Jon was already starting down the slope, crouching and skidding on his feet so he wouldn't lose his balance.

"Just come and tell me I'm not hallucinating," Brendon said.

He was standing underneath the overhanging rock, looking into a shadowy cave. He had his light out of his pack and he didn't turn around when Jon walked up behind him.

"You see this too, right?"

Jon blinked. "I—yeah. Wow. Yeah, I see it."

It was a staircase. There was an arch carved into the stone, and after that a narrow staircase curved down into the ground.

"I guess somebody lived here after all," Jon said. He was speaking quietly, almost a whisper, although he didn't know why. "Want to see where it goes?"

Brendon grinned excitedly. "Lead the way, Jon Walker."

Jon dug his light out and switched it on. The staircase was just wide enough for them to walk side by side. After the initial curve, after the archway and the daylight above was no longer visible, it widened even further and straightened out. It wasn't a particularly steep descent, although the steps were so large Jon felt like he was jumping down each one—climbing back up would be a bitch—and it was pleasantly cool beneath the surface. There were no intersecting tunnels, no forks in the path. Neither of them spoke as they made their way down.

After they'd been descending for five, maybe ten minutes, the stairs leveled out into a wide corridor through the stone. Their lights illuminated the walls and ceiling: the stone was carved with intricate designs, no symbols Jon had ever seen before. Some of the shapes looked like faces, but they were more triangular than round and had too many spots that could be eyes. Jon tried not to look at them as he walked past.

"You feel that?" Brendon whispered.

Jon nodded. There was a breeze in the tunnel.

They came to the chamber after another few minutes: the walls of the tunnel dropped away suddenly and they were standing at the side of a large room. The other side was about a hundred feet away from them, as best Jon could judge in the weak glow from his flashlight, and the ceiling about thirty feet high. All around the room there were doorways like the one they stood in: twelve feet high and wide enough for two men or more to stand shoulder to shoulder.

Brendon dropped his pack in the doorway—"So we know which one we came out of," he said at Jon's questioning glance—and walked into the center of the room, staring at the carvings in the walls and over the ceiling.

"I don't get it," Jon said. He stayed close behind Brendon, suddenly nervous about getting separated in the cool, dark tunnels. "There were explorers here. Why didn't they mention this? I doubt this is the only man-made structure on the planet."

"Maybe they didn't find it," Brendon said with a shrug. "Or maybe they did, but they didn't want to tell anybody."

Jon's neck hurt from looking up at the ceiling, but he didn't want to stop. The carvings were impossible to understand. In places they looked like random geometrical patterns, and in others they looked like some kind of written language, and it yet others they looked like they might be artistic scenes, only he couldn't figure out what they were supposed to be. Some of the images could be people, he thought, if people had triangle heads and arms longer than their bodies and three long toes on each foot.

Brendon went on, "Or maybe they did tell somebody, back when they first found it, but it's been purged from the records since there."

"Who would do that? And why?" Jon glanced down when he felt Brendon staring at him. "What?"

Brendon cast his light around the room. "Look at this place. Look at those pictures. The arches, the steps, everything—doesn't it all seem _big_ to you? How tall would you have to be to walk down those steps easily? Seven, eight feet, more? The proportions are all wrong."

"You mean—"

"I mean maybe whoever built this wasn't exactly human," Brendon said.

"But that's..." Jon licked his lips; his throat felt painfully tight. "That's not possible."

"Why not? There are things alive in this galaxy besides humans. You saw those creatures after we jumped."

"But those are—those were animals," Jon said, even though he knew it was a weak argument. They had no way of knowing what those unimaginably massive creatures were, so silent and beautiful as they glided through space.

"Maybe, maybe not. Whatever they are, they're not supposed to exist," Brendon pointed out. "They're not just a myth, Jon. They're _heresy_. People tell stories about them all the time, but did you know that if an Alliance pilot reports seeing them he can be discharged and excommunicated? Just for telling somebody, that's all."

Jon thought about the disbelief and joy and wonder on Spencer's face when they'd seen the creatures. He hadn't known that; he had never cared before what the Alliance would excommunicate its soldiers for. "That's different," Jon said. He started to shake his head. "This would be... Here, I mean, there's nothing that can—If there was something else in the galaxy that could build like humans, we would know by now." Humans had left the First System thousands of years ago, and they had been looking for intelligent alien species ever since without any luck. Every pilot who went into space joked about being the one who finally made first contact with another intelligent race, but nobody ever had.

"Maybe we do know," Brendon said, strangely insistent. His face was sharp and pale in the light. Jon had never seen him so serious. "Maybe somebody's always known, or they used to. The Alliance—if there's something that goes against what they believe, they destroy it. They have entire moons full of people whose job it is to do just that. Just erase it, wipe it away, like it never happened. Alien intelligence—non-human intelligence—that's one of those things, because if there are species out there more advanced than we are, if there ever have been, we don't have the divine mandate the Alliance uses to justify everything it does. If we're not alone, then everything the Alliance is doing is a _lie_. Do you really think they don't have a good reason for pretending places like this don't exist?"

Jon let out a shaky breath. He'd spent most of his life trying not to think too much about why the Alliance did what it did. He remembered what the rebels had told him on the refugee ship racing away from Lago: you didn't need to know the reasons to fight against it, or to run away from it. He didn't think Brendon would think much of that notion.

"You think that's what happened here?" Jon asked.

Brendon shrugged; he suddenly looked tired and deflated. "I don't know. It would be pretty amazing, wouldn't it? But it's just a bunch of tunnels carved into the ground. Maybe it was built by pre-Alliance humans who really liked triangles. Who knows what it used to be."

Jon watched as Brendon wandered along the length of the room. He could let it go. He could change the subject and know that Brendon would follow and the conversation could be over. He could pretend he hadn't noticed the uncharacteristic vehemence in Brendon's voice, the things he'd let slip that he probably hadn't meant to. That's what he ought to do, he thought. He ought to leave it be.

Or he could ask.

He said, "I'm guessing Inner Ring."

Brendon had been looking at the ceiling, but his head snapped up so quickly Jon was surprised he didn't hear something crack. "What?"

"That's where you're from," Jon said. He shone the light on Brendon's face, then away again. "One of the Inner Ring systems, right? Spencer said they met you on Aventine.

"Yes," Brendon said carefully. "They did. They saved my life."

"Aventine's a good gateway out of the Ring, no matter which planet you come from."

Brendon ran his hand through his sweaty hair and looked up at the ceiling again. "Eden," he said. "How'd you guess?"

"Mostly because you keep it a secret," Jon admitted. "Because you know an awful lot about the Alliance even though you hate it. And you talk about going to school and learning about music and reading ancient history and all kinds of shit nobody else would bother to learn. Where else could you even learn that?"

The Inner Ring systems formed the center of the Alliance, and Eden was the wealthiest, most powerful of them all. On every ship, every colony, every station, wherever there was enough alcohol and enough bravado, people talked about what it would be like to take Eden from the Alliance. They talked about the buildings so tall they reached out of the atmosphere, the fleet so massive ships didn't even have to be armed to travel in-system, the riches so vast nobody was hungry, nobody was poor. Jon had never believed the outlandish stories, mostly because the stories were told by people like him, people who would never be within a thousand light years of Eden.

But if even half of the rumors were true, he couldn't imagine why anybody would give up that life of peace and plenty to rattle around the stars in a broken ship with a couple of fugitives.

"What's it like?" Jon asked. "Towering cities made of crystal, gardens that cover continents, summer all the time, all that shit they talk about? Is any of that true?"

Brendon exhaled a short, harsh breath. "Yeah, pretty much. It's all true."

"But you left."

"I left." Brendon looked at him steadily. He looked a little wary, as though he couldn't quite figure out why he was talking to Jon at all, but he wasn't angry. "I realized..." Brendon paused and looked up at the ceiling of the chamber again. "A few years ago I figured out that I would rather be starving to death in a gutter on Aventine than locked away safe in a crystal tower. At least in the gutter nobody was telling me what to do. That's why I left." He squinted at Jon and smiled crookedly. "You think it's a stupid reason?"

"No," Jon said simply. "I don't."

After a second, Brendon grinned, but there was something sharp about. "Now we both know just enough about each other to be dangerous, Jon Walker. We should be getting back to the ship."

That time it was Brendon who started walking first, and Jon who fell into step beside him.

They climbed out of the cave. The steps were, as Jon had predicted, a bitch to go up again, and by the time they reached the top his legs were aching and his lungs gasping for breath.

On the surface the light was changing as the sun began to set. It wouldn't be full dark for hours, Jon guessed, but the deep red quality to the light made it feel like a never-ending twilight. They didn't have any trouble following their tracks back to the ship, and when they got there they found that the airlock had been opened and the cargo ramp was down. Jon was glad for it; the ship could definitely do for a thorough airing out.

Jon heard somebody moving around in the tiny galley beside the cabin. It was Ryan. He looked up when Jon came over and said, "Oh, hi. You're back." He poured a cup of coffee and turned around to lean against the wall as he took a sip. "Are you guys hungry? I was just about to fix something. Spencer's still asleep. Did you find any—Jon?"

Jon was staring. He knew he was staring, but he couldn't stop himself. The hands he had noticed before. Of _course_ he'd noticed the hands. Ryan didn't always wear gloves, and it's not like Jon could miss it if somebody he saw every day had three artificial fingers on one hand and two on the other. And he'd seen glimpses of metal at Ryan's spine when he wasn't wearing a scarf, and he'd thought maybe, maybe it was like William's eyes, maybe there had been an accident and Ryan had just decided that cybernetic hands were better than no hands at all.

But now Ryan wasn't wearing gloves or a scarf or socks and his shirt was unbuttoned and Jon was staring because it wasn't just his hands. Underneath the open shirt Jon could see that a full third of Ryan's chest was smooth, silver metal rather than flesh and skin, and there were long, narrow ribbons of the metal wrapped around his side to his back, disappearing into the waistband of his trousers. His feet, too, they were like his hands, as much metal as not.

Jon's heart was hammering in his chest and he couldn't breathe. He couldn't fucking _breathe_ , and Ryan was watching him, his face expressionless but his eyes wide and scared.

"You're—" Jon swallowed, hard. "You're—"

"He's still fucking _human_ ," Brendon snarled. Jon hadn't even noticed him coming into the galley.

The only cyborgs Jon had ever seen before were clumsy, hideous contraptions of mismatched parts and shattered limbs, pieced together by desperate men and women in filthy back alley workshops and refugee camps, so pumped full of antibiotics and pain meds to keep the remaining flesh parts from rebelling and decaying they were barely awake, barely alive. It was illegal—not just illegal, he thought, remembering what Brendon had said in the underground chamber, it was _heresy_ —and it was painful and dangerous and it never prolonged anybody's life very long anyway, not in any way that any reasonable person would want to survive.

He had never seen any cybernetic work like Ryan's. He didn't even know it was possible.

When Jon didn't say anything, Brendon said, "Whatever the fuck it is you're thinking, Walker, he's _still human._ " He'd never heard Brendon so angry before.

"I used to be all human, believe it or not," Ryan said. "Flesh and blood all the way through, just like a real boy." He held out one hand and flexed his fingers, metal and flesh both. His voice shook and he looked pale, drawn and worried.

"What—" Jon licked his lips and took an unsteady breath. "What happened?"

"There was an accident. A bomb went off too soon."

"And you—"

"I should have died," Ryan said. "But some—some _friends_ of mine thought this would be better."

Jon tried to imagine what that would be like: an explosion that ought to have killed him and a moment of terrifying certainty, then the shock of waking up to days or weeks or months of pain as those so-called friends pieced his broken body back together with mechanical replacements. He shuddered. "That must've been..." He couldn't think of a word strong enough.

The corners of Ryan's lips quirked. "Yeah," he said. "It was."

"And those friends of yours?"

"They saved my life," Ryan said evenly. "If I ever see them again, I'll probably kill them."

Jon nodded. He cleared his throat. There were a lot of things he wanted to ask—starting with _how?_ because, fuck, that was amazing work—but he didn't let himself, not yet.

He gave what he hoped was a reassuring smile and said, "I'll help you fix dinner while Brendon tells you what we found."

Ryan's eyes widened in surprise. "I, uh. Okay. Sure." He looked suddenly shy and vulnerable, his careful, rigid calm wavering. He turned away to button up his shirt.

Brendon's laugh was nervous, relieved. He jumped up to sit on the counter and began to kick his feet excitedly. "Seriously, Ry, it's crazy what we found. Way more shocking than you being a mysterious man of metal." He glanced at Jon and smiled. "Jon's had kind of a shocking day all around. Give the man a cup of coffee."


	4. Chapter 4

**iv.**

They stayed on Tharsis II for seven days.

It was longer than Spencer wanted, but every time he and Jon fixed something on the ship they found another something that had been damaged when the settler exploded. They didn't have any source of parts besides what extras they carried, so they spent a lot of time bickering over what they could fix and what could wait, and they did a lot of improvisational experiments. Or, rather, Jon did a lot of improvisational experiments, and Spencer did a lot of saying, "If that doesn't work, we're all going to die," but going along with it anyway.

Brendon helped them sometimes, but he was obsessed with the underground tunnels and chambers he and Jon had found. He spent hours during the day exploring them and hours at night poring over the images he'd recorded of the strange carvings. Ryan promised to try to help him translate the carvings, but he confided to Spencer that he didn't think he would be able to. Jon went with Brendon sometimes. Never for the whole day and never when he was in the middle of something else, and always with a sheepish smile and a shrug, saying by way of apology, "Somebody's got to make sure he doesn't get lost."

Spencer had gone with them once, but he didn't go back.

The days were hot and long and quiet. The wind blew constantly on the planet's surface, but never strongly, never more than a gentle breeze. There was no weather—there was no water in the atmosphere to speak of—and every day was identical to the one before it. Even inside the ship Spencer felt like everything had taken on a reddish-orange tint, the blended colors of the rocks and canyons and dust and sky. At night the temperature dropped enough to make them shiver if they were out after dark.

Spencer didn't like to be outside after the sun set. They had seen nothing, neither with their own eyes or the ship's sensors, to indicate that the planet was anything other than long-abandoned and completely empty. But he didn't like the darkness anyway.

"It gives me the creeps too," Ryan murmured. "It's too quiet."

It was before dawn and they were lying in bed on the top bunk, on their sides with Ryan's back to Spencer's chest. Spencer had woken earlier when Brendon got up to go back to the tunnels, and again when Jon woke and followed him, but now the ship was quiet. From the weak, pink light and cool fresh air through the cabin doorway Spencer knew they'd left the cargo ramp open. He didn't mind; there was nothing on the planet that would come in, and Clover never ventured far from the ship when she went outside.

"We'll be ready to leave soon," Spencer said. There was only so much work they could do on the ship here with limited tools and limited parts. Once they reached Leviathan and Brendon sold the contraband they'd been carrying since Corvus they would have the means and money to do more thorough repairs.

But they might not have Jon to help. He was leaving the ship at Leviathan. The was the agreement. Just over three weeks, Spencer realized with a start. They'd only know Jon for a few weeks.

Spencer sighed and turned onto his back, but the bed was too narrow and curved wall got in his way. He felt claustrophobic and restless, so he rolled over Ryan and dropped to the floor. He felt Ryan watching him as he dressed.

"I think we'll be ready to leave by tomorrow morning," he said. He tugged a shirt over his head and ran a hand through his hair. He still wasn't used to thinking of the days in terms of morning and night, but after they left it wouldn't matter. It would probably be a long time before they were on a planet again. He turned to look at Ryan and asked, "Do you think Brendon will be okay leaving?"

Curled on his side with his hands tucked under his head, Ryan shrugged. "He knows we can't stay here forever. We need fuel and water. I don't think he'll put up a fight."

Spencer muttered, "I hope so," but he went to get breakfast without arguing. Ryan was probably right. It was just that Spencer had never seen Brendon so intensely focused on anything, and he felt almost guilty that they had to take him away from that. Brendon never offered much of an opinion about where they went, and Spencer had spent a few years assuming Brendon was content as an aimless wanderer. Now he wasn't so sure.

It was already hot by the time Spencer went outside to work on the ship. They'd fixed the Alcubierre web already and Jon was confident the mag drive would work properly, but Spencer still wanted to recalibrate the artificial gravity. It wasn't much fun to be slammed around every time the ship had to make a rapid adjustment.

He had been working underneath the ship for some time when he sensed somebody behind him and said, "It's about time you came out to help."

No answer.

Spencer stood upright carefully to avoid hitting his head and looked around. There was nobody nearby. "Ryan?" he called, turning in a slow circle. Spencer was in the shade underneath the ship, and he stepped out, squinting in the light. There was nobody. The hair on the back of his neck rose, and he walked around the ship until he reached the ramp.

"Ryan?" he called again.

"Yeah?" Ryan's voice echoed from inside the ship.

Spencer walked up the ramp. "Were you just outside?"

Ryan was sitting on the floor of the cargo bay with his back to one of the crates; he had a tablet resting on his knees. On the display Spencer saw the array of lines and rows of numbers that meant he was calculating routes. "No," Ryan said. "I've been here since I got up. Why?"

Spencer frowned. "Nothing."

"I told you," Ryan said with a knowing look. "This place gives me the creeps."

"Me too," Spencer agreed.

Jon and Brendon came back to the ship before sunset. They were both quiet, strangely subdued, and Brendon retreated immediately to the cabin with the images he'd taken that day. Jon apologized for taking off, and he sounded like he really meant it, but Spencer knew there wasn't much more they could get done anyway. He had Jon help him make the final adjustments on the grav system, and by the time they were done it was getting dark. Ryan called out to them that it was time for supper, so they headed around to the ramp to go inside.

Halfway up the ramp, Spencer stopped mid-step. A chill ran through him. He turned around slowly and took a few steps back down to the end of the ramp. The landscape was deep red as it grew darker, and the wind was stronger, cooler at night.

"Spencer?" Jon's footsteps clanked on the ramp. "What's wrong?"

Spencer couldn't see anything except the empty land. Overhead the stars were coming out. The night was silent and clear.

"Nothing," Spencer said. He shrugged, trying to work out the suspicious itch between his shoulders. "It's nothing. Let's go eat."

They left the next morning. Brendon said nothing as Spencer and Ryan discussed their route and their plans, and he didn't say anything as they took off and broke orbit to start on their course toward the Leviathan Belt.

Once they were underway and the ship hadn't unexpectedly exploded or lost power or anything equally unpleasant, Spencer left Ryan at the helm and went to find Brendon. Brendon was lying on the lower bunk in the cabin, looking through images of the underground chambers on a tablet.

Spencer sat down on the edge of the bed. "We can go back," he said.

Brendon lowered the tablet and looked at him. "What do you mean?" he asked slowly.

"After we sell the stuff we're carrying and do the recon Ryan wants to do around Zion," Spencer explained. "We can go back to Tharsis. We can plan to spend some time there so you can..." He gestured at the tablet. "I don't know. Do more than take pictures. Explore the place some more."

"You didn't like it," Brendon said. "Why would you want to go back?"

"I thought it was creepy as fuck," Spencer agreed. "But if you're right about it, that's pretty important, isn't it?"

"Yeah," Brendon said with a laugh. "Yeah, it's pretty important."

"So we'll go back."

Brendon smiled. "That would be—that would be great, Spence. Thanks."

Spencer tucked his legs up to sit cross-legged beside Brendon and asked, "Have you been able to figure out any of those carvings?"

Brendon showed him the images he'd recorded and explained what he thought about them. Spencer didn't understand much of it, but he listened and asked questions and started to think that maybe it would be good to go back not just to assuage his guilt and cheer Brendon up, but because Brendon did seem to making some progress.

Some time later, they were talking about how they might find other tunnels and chambers elsewhere on the planet when Jon appeared in the doorway and tapped on the open door. "Ryan thinks there's something wrong with the EM sensors," he said.

Spencer climbed to his feet and followed Jon to the cockpit, Brendon right behind him. "What's up?"

Ryan was in the pilot's chair, tapping out commands on the panel. "At first I thought we were picking up our jump drive signature," he said. He brought up a series of graphs on the display: energy values for several wavelengths across the spectrum. There was a spike in all of them with a timestamp within less than half a second after their most recent jump.

Spencer leaned over Ryan's shoulder for a better look. "It doesn't look like feedback from our own drive," he said skeptically.

"I know," Ryan said. "So then I thought it was the jump sig from another ship, but there isn't anybody around."

"Are you sure?" Brendon asked.

Ryan said, "There's nothing on radar or subspace bands. We're in empty space."

"Could they be hiding? Or maybe they've already jumped away?"

Ryan glanced at Spencer, then looked at Brendon curiously. "Why do you say that?"

Brendon seemed to realize they were all watching him. He ducked his head and said, "No reason. I just had, I don't know. A feeling." He laughed a little. "It's stupid, I know."

Ryan looked at Brendon steadily for a long moment, then shook his head. "I thought maybe somebody had jumped away too, but the signal dissipates too quickly, and besides, this is the second time it's happened. I didn't notice it after the first jump, but diagnostics picked it up the second time."

Spencer sat in the navigator's chair and began scrolling through the sensor outputs. "We didn't even touch the sensors," he said with a scowl. "They were working fine, even after the explosion. Why would they be fucked up now?"

"Maybe it's—hey, pull up the data from the inertial dampeners," Jon said. He leaned on the back of Spencer's chair.

Spencer found the data and brought it on screen. "Why?"

"We didn't touch the EM sensors, but we did mess around a lot with the web and the artificial grav. See, there?" He pointed at the display. "Right after the jump the dampeners kicked up by about a hundred percent. It looks like for about a nanosecond the ship thinks—"

"It thinks we're carrying twice as much mass as we are," Spencer finished. He sat back in his chair and made a face at the display. "Damn it. I guess we didn't fix the web as well as we thought we did."

"We haven't gone off course," Ryan pointed out. "We're getting precision as good as what we normally get."

"So the web still works," Jon said. "It's just having a little bit of a mass redistribution problem after a jump."

Considering that the web's entire purpose was to redistribute mass-energy around the ship, Spencer didn't think that was exactly a little problem. But he also didn't think they could do anything about while they were in space, so he said, "Well, I guess we'll just watch to make sure it doesn't get worse. It would really kind of suck if the ship tore itself apart."

Jon laughed and patted his shoulder. "I'll go do some tests on the dampeners and grav to see if there are any other problems."

The problem didn't get any worse over the next few days, but it didn't go away either. They were cautious with every jump, but they neared Leviathan without any other problems.

With all of the ships and stations in ever-changing configurations, it was unsafe to jump into the Leviathan Belt itself, so the last jump took them into the Eliezer system, a pale yellow-white star orbited by a single gas giant. The several rocky moons surrounding the system's planet made up one of the last colonies in that part of the galaxy to remain independent of the Alliance.

That is, it had been.

As soon as they came out of the jump and space reformed around them with a silent, subtle _snap_ , all of the ship's proximity sensors began chiming at once.

"Something's wrong," Ryan said.

"Yeah, I can see that," Spencer snapped. There were far more ships in orbit around Eliezer's planet than there ought to be. A blockade. "Shit. Mother _fuck_ , are those Alliance ships? Get us out of here."

"They don't—fuck, I don't know." Ryan's fingers were already flying over the display. "They look Alliance."

The data scrolled across Spencer's display, adding to what he could already guess from the view through the window. There were probably two hundred ships making up the blockade around Eliezer's largest moon, and Ryan was right: they looked like Alliance warships.

"What the hell are they—"

"Who cares?" Spencer said. "Get us out of here before they see us."

"I'm _trying_ ," Ryan snapped. "I can't—there's some kind of interference, I can't fix the stars and I have no fucking idea why, I can't..."

"Oh," Spencer said quietly. He watched the numbers on the display: every star position and relative distance was jumping around wildly. It was impossible for them to calculate any kind of jump coordinate. He gave the command to fire up the thrusters, but he knew it wouldn't be enough. They didn't have that kind of power. "I guess that answers our question."

"What?" Ryan looked at him sharply. "You know what this is?"

"I didn't know they'd gotten it to work," Spencer said.

"Gotten _what_ to work?"

Spencer tried to turn the ship, to pull away from orbit around Eliezer and run, but it was sluggish to respond and the thrusters couldn't seem to decide how to make the turn. He ought to be panicking, he thought. An alarm sounded: they were being contacted by one of the nearest ships. He ought to be panicking, but he felt strangely calm. The ship's lights dimmed and flickered, and the cockpit displays flashed suddenly with bright lines, then nonsensical numbers began scrolling down the screens. Spencer heard Jon and Brendon talking in alarmed voices in the cargo bay.

"Spencer." Ryan's voice was low and scared. "What the hell is going on?"

"We just jumped into a trap," Spencer said. "Next they're going to—"

The pulse hit the ship a second later.

It didn't sound like anything. It didn't feel like anything. One moment there was an Alliance ship approaching in the distance, repeating a rote demand to surrender immediately, and the next moment every single system in their ship shut down. No light, no navigation, no life support, no gravity. Everything was dark and silent. They were in freefall and they had no control. Through the window Spencer could see the Alliance ship approaching quickly; there was probably another one behind them, he thought. They did everything in pairs. As the massive ship drew closer he could see the capture bay yawning wide and open.

Spencer grabbed onto his chair to stay in place. "I don't know how long the field can last," he said. "We might be able to restart—Ryan? Ryan, what are you—"

He trailed off in horror. Ryan was strapped into his chair—he was always careful like that—but he'd gone completely rigid, his face contorted in an unnatural expression of pain, and his limbs were starting to tremble. Spencer knew they'd been hit by a powerful electromagnetic pulse designed to render a ship completely helpless but leave the crew alive, but that assumed the crew was completely flesh and blood. Ryan's cybernetic parts were just as vulnerable to the weapon as the ship.

"Ryan!" Spencer hauled himself over and grabbed Ryan's shoulder, tried to feel along his neck and chest for a heartbeat. His heart was still flesh, that wasn't mechanical, but Spencer couldn't tell if it was still beating. "Ryan, Ryan, come on, come on," he repeated desperately. Ryan was shaking more violently now—convulsing—and there were tiny flashes of blue light racing along the metal in his chest and arms. "Don't do this," Spencer pleaded. "Don't fucking do this. Wake up, Ry. Come on."

A shadow passed over them, and Spencer twisted around. The Alliance warship loomed large in the window.

-

Jon fell to the floor and hit his head when the ship was brought into the gravity field of the capture bay.

He woke up when something sharp pricked his neck. He was lying on a warm metal floor, and there was a uniformed man with a gun standing over him.

"This one's not in the database," another man said.

The man with the gun kicked Jon in the side. "Get up," he said. "What's your name?"

Jon struggled to sit up. Spencer and Brendon were kneeling beside him, their hands behind their heads and gazes downcast. Ryan was lying face down on the floor beyond them; his eyes were closed and he wasn't moving. There was a line of Alliance soldiers before them, all armed.

The soldier prodded Jon with his gun. "Up, you. Who are you?"

Jon rose to his knees and put his hands behind his head, but he didn't say anything. He knew he wasn't in the Alliance records anywhere. He had no intention of giving them his name.

The man shook head his, apparently not surprised, and said to the others, "Take this one to the brig. See if you can't make him more talkative."

A soldier pulled Jon to his feet and shoved him out of the line. Jon tried to look back: Spencer glanced at him warily, but Brendon wasn't watching. His head was cocked to one side, his eyes distant, as though he was listening to something nobody else could hear. There was a bruise on the side of his face and his lip was bleeding slightly.

Another man was kneeling beside Ryan and pulled his head up by his hair. "What do you want me to do with this?"

The man barely glanced over his shoulder. "See if it has any parts worth salvaging, then throw the rest out."

Spencer's head snapped up. "No! Don't—"

One of the soldiers stepped forward and jammed the muzzle of his gun under Spencer's chin. "Don't move. We're confiscating the machine," he said calmly. "This will be easier for all of you if you cooperate."

Two soldiers dragged Ryan out of the room. He didn't move at all. Jon couldn't even tell if he was still alive.

"Find out who these other two are," the leader went on. "I'm tired of fucking around." He jerked his head at the man with the medical analyzer.

The man moved to prick Brendon's arm for a blood sample, then Spencer's. Brendon was paying attention now. His eyes were wide and he was perfectly still. The soldier looked bored as he waited for the database search to end.

"Forward." The soldier behind Jon nudged his back, marching him out of the room. Behind them, Jon heard another man saying in a loud, surprised voice, "Call the captain _immediately_. He needs to get down here."

So they'd identified Spencer. Jon knew there was never a chance they wouldn't.

Under the guard of two armed soldiers, Jon walked down several long corridors and rode two separate lifts through the ship. He was hopelessly disoriented after five minutes. The ship wasn't the largest he had ever been on, but every corridor was the same pale color and none of the doors or sections seemed to be labeled. The only thing he learned was the name of the ship, because it was printed on every uniform in a neat patch on the chest: _Nova Gloria_.

The ship's brig was just as brightly light as the rest of the ship, but the corridor was narrower and the men standing guard eyed Jon and the soldiers suspiciously as they stood aside.

The cell they put him in was small: barely four feet wide, six feet long. The soldiers shoved Jon through the door and closed it quickly behind him. The door didn't slam; it slid shut silently. He couldn't even hear the soldier's footsteps retreating. There were no windows, no openings, no vents, no break in the smooth, off-white walls that Jon could see. He spent a few minutes looking, even though he knew it was hopeless. If there was one thing the Alliance had always known how to do, it was build a prison cell nobody could break out of.

He was breathing. The room was small, closed, but he was still breathing. He had to concentrate on that.

He didn't hear anything. He didn't smell anything or taste anything. But Jon knew somehow that the air in the cell was changing. He felt a slow, growing tightness in his lungs, a sudden dryness in his throat. He held up one hand before his face: his vision was blurring slightly. Jon tried to make a fist, but his fingers were slow to respond. They felt fat, awkward, like he was watching somebody else's hand rather than his own. He took a step backward, but his knees buckled immediately and panic raced through him.

He couldn't feel his feet. Jon fell to his knees—he couldn't feel his knees either, he couldn't stay upright but he felt nothing as he fell. It was like every one of his limbs had been replaced by lifeless meat, useless and heavy, and his vision was fading quickly. Jon tried to shout, but his tongue didn't work, he couldn't even be sure he still had a tongue. He knew he was trying to scream, to fight, to move, but he was trapped.

Everything went black.

He heard nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing. His mind told him he was still struggling to sit up, still gasping for breath, still screaming, but there was no sensation at all. Jon knew he was panicking wildly, but he couldn't even feel his heart racing.

I'm dead, he thought. This is what it's like to be dead.

"Not yet, I'm afraid."

The voice was huge. It was the loudest voice Jon had ever heard—if he was even hearing it. He realized, in some corner of his mind, that his ears might not have anything to do with it. It filled his head, washed over every part of him, chased every other thought away.

Maybe that's how they work, he thought. Maybe they can control your thoughts. He had thought about asking Spencer more about the Alliance, but he never had.

"Smith, Spencer James, formerly Captain," the voice intoned heavily. "Nuevo Montenegro origin. Buckton Station training. Commendation of honor for aiding in the subjugation and cleansing of Ypsilon-X5H and surrounding satellites, later retracted. Discharged and excommunicated for treason and crimes against the Chosen Alliance of Humankind, First and Only Among the Stars. To be executed immediately upon arrest or capture."

No, Jon thought desperately.

"I'm sorry," the voice said. "Is he a friend of yours?"

Fuck you, Jon thought.

"So familiar, yet you haven't even introduced yourself."

Jon tried not to think it, he _tried_ , but his own name floated through his thoughts.

"Ah. Walker, Jonathan Jacob. An orphan of Lago? How touching."

With the mention of Lago, memories and images filled Jon's mind. The parade before the invasion, his mother laughing, his father dying on the refugee ship.

"Now that we've been properly introduced," the voice went, "you must allow me to indulge my curiosity. What is a non-entity such as yourself doing in the presence of one so important?"

Who? Jon asked in confusion. Spencer?

"Don't be foolish," the voice said. It was angry, Jon could feel it as much as hear it. "We will have the truth."

It began as a prick of discomfort. Jon couldn't even pinpoint the location at first, but he recognized it soon as his right hand. The numbness faded slowly, painfully, and the discomfort grew into a burning sensation. It was the only thing Jon could feel, the only thing he could concentrate on, and his mind conjured visions of flames and charred bone and fleshing falling away. It hurt more than anything he'd ever felt, worse than anything he ever could have imagined. He was screaming inside his mind, begging for it to stop.

"Tell us about the lost son."

The pain lessened suddenly. It didn't vanish, but it was as though his body flushed with painkillers.

I don't know who you're talking about, Jon thought.

But even as he was forming the protest, he remembered: _Eden_ and _I would rather be starving to death in a gutter on Aventine_ and _now we both know just enough about each other to be dangerous_.

And he thought, No.

"You didn't know," the voice said. It sounded amused. "You had no idea. I find your ignorance astonishing, but I do not believe you are lying."

No. No way. It's not possible.

"He chose not to reveal his identity to you? Interesting."

It's not possible, Jon thought angrily.

"But not, perhaps, surprising. His family destroyed your world, murdered your parents. And you had no idea."

You're wrong. You have to be wrong. Not possible, he thought furiously. It's not possible. He wouldn't have—

But they all lied. And Brendon hid himself more than any of them.

"You're not very intelligent, are you? Tell us how you met your crewmates and where you have been."

Jon's mind was racing, confused and conflicting thoughts tangled up in each other, the steady litany of _no, no, no, it's not possible_ changing only when he realized he should try not to think about Zeta Dra and his time there. There were too many people there who could be hurt. He concentrated as much as he could on the ruined mining colony instead. That encounter would already be in the Alliance records; he wouldn't be telling them anything he didn't already know.

"And then?" the voice prompted smoothly.

And then nothing, Jon insisted. Here we are.

"I don't believe you."

The burning pain returned to Jon's right hand. He didn't know how he could feel anything in his hand at all anymore. It must be burned to a stump. But the pain was just as strong as before, perhaps even worse, and after a few seconds, a few minutes, Jon was begging for them to stop.

"Tell us where you have been."

The attack in space, the jump, the hours of darkness—then nothing.

That's odd, Jon thought.

The voice did not reply.

The pain subsided and Jon found himself growing calmer. He could see it perfectly in his memory: the red planet with the fossils and the tunnels, the week they spent on its hot, dry surface—and Brendon, fuck, always Brendon, curious and insistent, tracing his fingers over the carvings in the walls, grinning at Jon in the pattern of light and shadow. But the memory, strong as it was, felt peculiar in his mind, like it was wrapped in a strange, cool bubble. It felt as though each memory faded to nothing when he tried to focus.

We went to Eden, Jon thought experimentally. We went to Centauri. We went to Deneb. We went to the First System.

The voice said again, "Tell us where you have been."

It can't hear me, Jon realized.

"We will find out from your crewmates, Mr. Walker, and we will not be as kind to them as we are being to you."

Don't hurt them, Jon thought. And that, at least, got through. But Jon didn't know why. He couldn't tell if he was doing anything different.

"We are afraid you give us no choice," the voice said. "Why do you choose to protect them rather than yourself? Do you know what happened to Ypsilon-X5H? Do you know how many people died that day?"

Stop, Jon said.

"And do you know what becomes of men who sacrifice their humanity to become machines? We have studied the effect in great detail, you know, and we will study the machine who traveled with you as well. It is not worthy of your protection."

Leave him alone, Jon begged desperately.

"Tell us where you have been," the voice said.

No, Jon said.

 _No_ , another voice echoed. It was soft and whispery, the word drawn out like a nonsense sound. _No_.

"What was that?" For the first time, the voice sounded perturbed. "Do not play games with us."

I'm not, Jon thought.

 _I'm not_ , the echo hissed. _Do not play games_.

"What is that?" The voice was anxious now, almost scared. "No, I don't know," it said. "I have no idea. There's some kind of interference in the chamber, I think, or—I don't know."

 _I don't know_ , the echo whispered quietly.

"There, you see? The prisoner didn't say anything," the voice said. "Of course I'm sure! Get one of the techs down here."

What's going on? Jon asked.

 _Don't be scared_ , the voice whispered.

"Okay, okay," the voice said. It was trying for a semblance of calm. Jon could hear the strain behind the authority. "We are ending this interrogation. Do not think we are done with you, Jonathan Walker of Lago. We let you live for now because the Chancellor himself will wish to decide the punishment for those who have kidnapped his youngest son."

Kidnapped? Jon repeated in alarm. Is that what he told you?

But the voice was gone, and the whispers too. There was complete silence.

All at once Jon realized that he still couldn't hear his own breathing, or feel his heartbeat, or anything else at all. There was nothing at all, and without the voice booming in his mind the complete lack of sensory perception was overwhelming.

Remember, he told himself. They've done something to you, that's all. It's a drug, or some kind of mind control, _something_. Your body is still here. You just have to _think_.

He thought about the heat of the sun on Tharsis II, and the gritty feel of the red rock under his fingers as he scrambled up a steep slope. He thought of the burn in his muscles and sweat trickling down his back and tenderness of his skin after hours outside. He couldn't feel any of it and even remembering was difficult, but he concentrated, sorted through the memories one by one, trying to stave off panic. The most recent memories were the strongest, the easiest to feel.

Youngest son, he thought. He couldn't feel his fists to clench them. There was anger growing like fear in his mind, but it felt like nothing, like a black fog drifting just out of reach.

He thought about the coolness of the underground caverns, the darkness that wrapped around them like a blanket, the weird way their voices echoed and rang. He thought of sharing meals of dried, bland protein foods and cups of hot coffee, of all of them squeezing around the little table in the galley and talking about what they'd done during the day, just like they were a regular group of friends going about their lives, not a fugitive starship crew temporarily stranded on an empty planet. They'd all slept on the same schedule when they were on the planet. Jon had offered to sleep on the floor, but Brendon had just laughed and said, "I don't kick _that_ much," and already tucked under the covers on the top bunk Ryan had muttered, "He really does, Jon. Don't say we didn't warn you." It had been a long, long time since Jon had slept beside somebody else, wrapped up together warm and peaceful and safe.

His youngest son, the voice had said.

The images were there, but Jon felt like he was watching his own life on a screen. The picture was fuzzy and the sound turned off and everything was so removed, so distant, too far away to touch.

It wasn't working. He couldn't feel anything.

-

They put Spencer in a cell and left him there for hours.

It was better than he expected. He had been certain they would execute him as soon as his name came up in the database. Those were their orders. And Alliance soldiers were nothing if not good at following orders. He guessed he had Brendon to thank for giving them a problem that superseded their orders.

Spencer closed his eyes and swallowed painfully.

He had no way to track the passage of time in the featureless white cell, but he could guess by how tired he was, how hungry he felt, how stiff his limbs became. It wouldn't do any good to shout or pound on the walls or beg for them to speak to him. There wasn't room enough for him to stand comfortably and he couldn't even take two steps. He sat with his back against the wall and waited.

He could imagine what was happening elsewhere in the ship. The captain would contact his superior, and that man would contact his, every one of them passing the problem up the chain of command. He wondered what their messages said: _We have captured a stolen ship. One of the crew members appears to be the Chancellor's long lost youngest son. Please advise._

They had guessed there was something about Brendon—no, Spencer corrected himself, Brent had guessed, and he and Ryan had agreed—the very first time they met him. It was winter on Aventine and Brendon had been mostly skin and bones when Brent brought him to the hangar where they were waiting for clearance to leave the planet. Sometimes it took weeks to get permission to take off from Aventine, and Spencer had been worried their forged documents wouldn't pass inspection. He really had not wanted the extra trouble of dealing with a stranger who was probably looking for a way to rip them all off. But when Brent introduced them and Spencer had said nothing at all, just gave Brendon his best _I am not impressed and if you try anything I'll kill you_ glare, Brendon had only smiled sheepishly and said, "It's okay. I just want somewhere to warm up. I'll leave in an hour and—" And whatever else he was going to do Spencer never found out, because Brendon had started coughing so hard he doubled over in pain, and Ryan was at his side with a hand on his back, giving Spencer an apologetic look before ushering Brendon into the hangar. They gave him a blanket and hot soup and left him in the galley of their old ship to talk in the cockpit.

"He's running away from something," Brent had said.

Spencer snorted: they were all running away from something.

"No, I mean, I think he's maybe from one of the Fidelis moons or something? He didn't say. I'm just guessing from some things he said, the way he talks." Brent had shrugged, and Ryan had nodded thoughtfully in agreement. The Fidelis moons were the home of the ultra-devout Alliance sects, the people who thought even the Chancellor and his army weren't carrying out the Alliance's goals with enough fervor.

"But why the hell did you bring him here?" Spencer had demanded.

Brent shrugged again. "He needs help."

It was a shitty reason to bring a stranger on board, but Spencer couldn't find it in himself to argue. None of them would be alive if somebody hadn't helped them at some point, and Spencer had done enough damage in his life. He didn't want to be the person who sent a starving runaway back out into the brutal Aventine winter. Brendon had nowhere else to go.

They'd received permission to leave Aventine five days later, and as they were walking back from the spaceport command with the newly acquired exit codes, Ryan had said, "We can keep him, you know."

Spencer had rolled his eyes and said, "He's not a pet."

But they did. When Spencer asked Brendon if he wanted to come along, Brendon's face had split in a huge smile and he'd thrown his arms around Spencer in a tight hug. "Thank you, thank you, thank you," he'd said over and over again, breathless with surprise. " _Thank you_."

Spencer only asked once where Brendon had come from, and when Brendon avoided the question he decided never to ask again, not even when Brendon asked the same of him. They were all running from something. As long as they kept running, where they came from didn't much matter.

But, Spencer admitted to himself, sitting in a small white cell aboard the _Nova Gloria_ , he would never in a million years have guessed that Brendon's "where he came from" was the Chancellor's immediate family. That was an option he'd definitely never considered.

The story was almost a myth itself, so confused by rumor and speculation even the Alliance troops had never heard the truth of it. All that anybody knew for sure was that one of the Chancellor's children had vanished some years ago. Every few months there was another report that he'd been spotted somewhere, on some unimportant moon, hiding away on some minor colony, but nothing ever came of it.

Spencer thought about every rumor he'd heard. He didn't think any of them coincided with places they'd actually been.

He wasn't sure whether he should be angry or impressed. It would be easier to be angry, he thought, if he hadn't had three years to learn that Brendon hated everything about the Alliance and the life he'd left behind. Even without knowing the details, he had known that. And it would be easier to be angry if Spencer wasn't certain the only reason he was alive was because of Brendon. And if Spencer was still alive, that meant Jon probably was too, and Ryan—

Spencer pressed the heels of his hands against his closed eyes.

He couldn't panic, not now. He had to figure out what was going on, to make a plan if he could. The fact that Spencer was still alive meant the ship's crew wasn't following protocol, and the fact that they weren't following protocol meant they might make a mistake.

"Breathe, Spence," he whispered. "Calm down." It was what Ryan would say if he were here.

Correct protocol was to execute any cyborg upon capture, although they didn't call it execution. They called it dismantling. One of the ship's subordinate engineers would remove all of the cybernetic parts for study. The Alliance claimed the parts were immediately destroyed, but it was a lie. They might forbid anybody else from having and using technology they had declared anathema, but that didn't mean they didn't want to be able to use it themselves.

There was never a medical officer present. They didn't care about the human parts that remained. If the prisoner was lucky and he had only a cybernetic arm or leg or other nonessential part, he might survive the shock of the procedure to be properly executed another day.

Spencer didn't realize he was holding his breath until his lungs started to burn.

 _Calm down_.

Spencer's eyes snapped open. The walls of the cell still glowed perfect, featureless white, and the door opposite him was still closed.

 _Don't be scared._

It was a whisper, so quiet he wondered for a moment if he was imagining it. But that would be what they wanted him to think. He didn't know all of the interrogation techniques the Alliance used—he had been a fighter pilot, flying missions that were just him and one or two crew members and a small, fast ship—but he knew enough.

 _Don't be scared,_ the voice whispered again.

"Go fuck yourself," Spencer answered.

The white walls of the cell dimmed abruptly, then flared back to full brightness.

"Please," Spencer said, rolling his eyes. His voice was shaking but he went on anyway, "I used to be one of you, remember? You'll have to try harder than that."

There was no reply. Spencer frowned. After hours of leaving him alone they were finally starting the interrogation, but they weren't going about it in any familiar way. He pinched himself: he could still feel everything just fine, so they weren't filling the cell with nerve gas yet.

 _Wait_ , the whisper said.

"I can't do much else."

 _Wait._

Spencer did not want to ask what he was waiting for. He wiped his palms nervously on his pants and tried not to fidget. They were watching as sure as they were listening, and they would use everything they saw. He couldn't control his racing heart, but he could keep his breathing measured and controlled, keep his movements calm and steady.

 _Wait._

The door to the cell slid open soundlessly.

Spencer blinked several times and rubbed his eyes. But the door remained open. Through it he could see the slightly darker corridor beyond, the walls that were a bit less white and the closed door of another cell opposite.

"Shit," he muttered. He was hallucinating. They'd put some kind of drug into the cell and he hadn't even realized it.

There was nobody outside the cell: no guard, no interrogator. Spencer listened but he couldn't hear anything, and he knew if he was drugged that didn't mean much anyway. He crawled away from the wall—he could still _feel_ everything, or at least his mind thought he could—and looked cautiously through the open cell door, half-expecting it to slide shut the moment he tried.

But nothing happened. He struggled to his feet, swaying unsteadily for a moment as the blood rushed back into his stiff legs, and stepped out of the cell.

Still nothing. He looked to the left and right, but there was nobody to be seen. There was nothing but a long corridor of closed cells—

No, he realized with a start. Not all of them. A patch of bright light cut across the corridor about twenty feet to his left: another open cell door.

 _There isn't much time._ The whisper hissed around him like a breeze he couldn't feel. _Hurry._

Spencer hesitated. If he was hallucinating, they were playing some kind of game with him and it wouldn't matter what he did. If he wasn't—he had no idea what that meant. But he wouldn't find out standing still.

He moved cautiously at first toward the other open cell. No soldiers appeared and nothing tried to stop him, and some part of him wasn't even surprised when he reached the cell and saw Jon lying unconscious on the floor. That was exactly the kind of game they would play, if they thought it would help them learn something.

 _Hurry_.

Unless they weren't doing this at all.

Spencer didn't let himself hesitate any more. He dragged Jon out of the cell—and fuck, he wasn't unconscious, Spencer realized, not exactly. His eyes were open and his lips moving as though he was trying to say something, but he gave no indication that he saw Spencer and he made no sound except a low, pained moan. There was a sickly smell in the cell and a stain down the front of Jon's shirt, and his bare forearms were marked with long red scratches, some of them dotted with dried blood. He was pale and limp and he looked terrible, but Spencer checked his pulse and his breathing and forced himself to stay calm. That was what the sensory deprivation drugs did: the blindness, the deafness, the desperate scratching and pinching he couldn't control. But the drugs weren't lethal; the effects would fade eventually.

 _Hurry._

"Shut the fuck _up_ ," Spencer snapped. And that was just great: now he was talking to voices in his head. "Hurry where?"

Something flickered at the edge of his vision, and Spencer spun around. But he saw nothing. It was the end of the corridor, the entrance to the brig, but there was nobody there now.

Toward or away, he thought. If this warship was like others he'd been on, that was the only way out of the brig.

He left Jon lying in a heap in the corridor and ran down to the brig entrance where soldiers should be standing guard. That door, too, was open, and Spencer's heart was pounding painfully as he edged closer, listening, waiting for the guards to burst through any moment.

He leaned out cautiously to look around.

Both guards were standing right outside the door, staring right at him.

Spencer jerked back and pressed himself against the wall. But he didn't hear a shout of alarm and no weapons fired. He didn't hear anything at all. No guards rushed into the corridor to stop him.

He counted to ten and leaned out again. The guards were still there. Their eyes were still open, fixed unblinking on where he stood. They hadn't moved.

They hadn't moved _at all_.

Spencer stepped away from the wall and into the doorway. "Hey," he said.

No reaction. They didn't even blink. They had their weapons in hand, but they weren't raised.

"Okay," Spencer said uncertainly. He exhaled slowly and walked over to one of the guards. The man did not move at all. He didn't even seem to be breathing. Spencer touched his arm. Still no response. "Okay," Spencer said again, quietly. He lifted the weapon from the man's hands. "I have no fucking idea what's going on, but I'm just going to borrow this, all right?"

He turned and ran back to where he'd left Jon. He knelt down to lift Jon over his shoulder, mumbling a quick, "Sorry, sorry," when Jon groaned, even though Spencer knew Jon couldn't hear him.

The soldiers didn't try to stop him when he left. They didn't do anything at all, and neither did any of the others Spencer passed. He was careful moving through the ship at first, rounding each corner with the weapon aimed, but he soon realized that every member of the crew was just as frozen as the guards outside the brig. Then he ran.

If they've drugged me, Spencer thought with grim amusement, if this is a test, if this is part of their interrogation, I'm failing miserably.

Carrying Jon over his shoulder, he found the ship's capture bay. He didn't know the _Nova Gloria_ well enough to get there without a few mistakes, but Alliance warships all had a similar arrangement and he found it soon enough. Even if their ship was out of commission—standard protocol for a captured ship—the bay would have fighters, transports, other ships he could fly.

The door to the bay was open. The _airlock_ was open, and that was strange enough to make Spencer hesitate.

He was trying to decide whether or not to go through when he heard footsteps approaching. It was the first sound besides his own breathing and Jon's quiet gasps that he'd heard since leaving the brig. He swung his borrowed weapon up and backed around a corner and waited, holding his breath, as the footsteps came closer.

He saw the shadow first, and he was ready to fire when somebody barreled around the corner and stopped abruptly. It was Brendon.

Brendon threw his hands up and stumbled backwards. "Hey, hey, it's me. Don't shoot."

Spencer dropped the weapon to his side. " _Fuck_. Brendon, what—what the fuck is going on?"

Brendon was red-faced and panting, as though he'd just run through the ship as well. "I don't know," he said after a moment. He ran a hand through his hair and shook his head. "At least, I don't think—I don't know. But it's real and—"

"How do you know that?" Spencer demanded. His shoulders were aching from carrying Jon, but Spencer didn't dare put him down yet. "This could be an interrogation hallucination. It could be—"

"Spencer," Brendon said calmly. "They're not going to interrogate _me_. Nobody in the Alliance would dare do that."

Spencer stared at him for a moment. Brendon was right, of course. Nobody in the Alliance would knowingly lay a hand on a member of the Chancellor's family.

But to hear Brendon actually say it—Spencer had only half-believed it before, in spite of the confusion and fear of the soldiers when they identified Brendon, he'd still wondered if it was all a mistake.

Brendon was waiting for him to say something. He kept glancing over his shoulder nervously, but mostly he looked at Spencer steadily, and he waited.

"I could be hallucinating you," Spencer pointed out. "And all of the rest of this."

Brendon smiled crookedly. "Yeah. And normally I think your paranoid nature is pretty helpful in keeping us alive, but right now, Spence, we need to get the fuck out of here. I don't know how long they can keep this up."

"They? _Who_?"

Instead of answering, Brendon asked, "Is Jon okay?"

"He's alive," Spencer said. "It'll wear off. I need to—"

"Engineering seven," Brendon said. "I don't know where it is. I've never been on a ship like this before."

"What?"

"That's where they took Ryan. They wouldn't let me see him and I don't know—I told them to stop what they—I told them to stop, but I don't know if they did. But I made them tell me where he is. Engineering seven. Can you find it?"

Spencer nodded.

"Leave Jon here," Brendon said. "Go get Ryan. I'll take care of the rest."

"What are you—"

" _Go_ ," Brendon said. "We don't have much time."

Spencer set Jon down on the floor carefully. "I can't be hallucinating," he said when he straightened up. "There's no way I'd ever dream up you being this bossy."

He hurried away before Brendon had a chance to answer.

Engineering seven was one of the machine labs not far from the capture bay, just one level down. Spencer passed several more unmoving crew members on his way there. He knew to expect them now, but they weren't any less eerie. They all look like they'd been stopped mid-task: walking, talking, working. There were two guards posted outside Engineering seven—they would be terrified of Ryan even if he didn't threaten them at all, even if he _couldn't_ —and inside there were two techs standing like statues over a workbench in the center of the room. They each held tools in their hands and their uniforms were splattered with blood and on the table—

"Ryan!" Spencer ran forward, shoving one of the frozen men aside to get to the table. The man toppled over without a sound. "Ryan, are you—can you hear me?"

Ryan's eyes were closed and he wasn't moving. Spencer couldn't even tell—fuck, fuck, _fuck_ , his hands were shaking but he felt at Ryan's neck for a pulse, found it weak and thready. He was breathing, much too shallow and too quick, but he was breathing.

("One of my lungs," Ryan had said, ticking off parts on his fingers and not meeting Spencer's eyes, "the other one is still real." A quirk of his lips, wry and bitter, and he still didn't look up. "My heart's still real too, but with everything else that's been replaced, that's the most vulnerable part.")

"Ryan," Spencer said again. "Can you hear me at all? Please, fuck, please be— _please_."

His hands were shaking so badly he could barely control them, but he touched Ryan's face and turned his head as gently as he could. As far as he could see, Ryan's spine was still intact. They had started with the extremities: his arms and legs were a bloody mess, all of the cybernetic bones and fibers removed. In one leg the jagged remains of his actual bones were startlingly white, surrounded by strips of flesh and skin peeled back. The techs had wrapped the ruined limbs in hermetic bandages. That meant they probably wanted to keep him alive long enough to get to his body's core parts, the cybernetic organs and nerves that were so rare, so impossible to get right.

("I still malfunction all the time," Ryan had said, almost like a joke. "Most of this—it's all experimental. I don't think they expected me to survive. Things keep going wrong I don't know how to fix. You know how lousy I am with mechanical repairs."

"Yeah," Spencer had said, thinking about how terrifying that must be, to have your own body failing and know there was nothing you could do about it. "It's a good thing I'm a lot better with that shit than you are."

Ryan had looked up at him then, the first time since he'd started talking, and there were tears in his eyes but he was smiling a little.)

That meant Ryan still had a chance. He might survive.

Spencer looked wildly around the room. But of course it was a workshop, not an infirmary, there was no hover-stretcher or anything else he could use. So he slipped one arm underneath Ryan's shoulders, the other under his knees—what was left of them—and lifted him carefully. Ryan flinched and his eyelids fluttered, but he didn't wake up.

"Sorry, sorry," Spencer said. "Just hang on, okay? Hang on and we'll get out of here. Brendon has a plan."

Spencer raced back to the capture bay as quickly as he could. The airlock was still open, but Brendon and Jon were no longer in the corridor outside. Spencer heard loud noises from within the bay: something was crackling, cracking, sparking. New fear slammed into him as he sprinted into the bay.

He stopped short and stared in horror. There was black smoke billowing out of _The World Is A Broken Bone_. Spencer saw licks of flames from the open cargo bay, and he heard the sharp, unmistakable sound of the electrical systems shorting out in showers of sparks.

"Spencer!" Brendon was on the other side of the burning ship. Jon was lying on the ground at his feet. There was some kind of box beside him, and one of their packs leaning against it. "Come on," Brendon shouted, waving him over. "It's almost time."

"Time for what? What the hell is going—" Spencer broke off abruptly.

The capture bay was open. The massive movable doors that normally protected the bay when the ship was traveling were open, and there was nothing between them and empty space. There were stars outside, glowing steadily in the distance, but nothing else. There was no sign of Eliezer or its moons or the Alliance blockade.

"Brendon," Spencer said quietly, "why aren't we dead?"

He felt something bitter and angry in him, something he recognized as disappointment. It was a hallucination after all. He would probably decompress in a moment. A psychological decompression, all of the pain and terror and hopelessness of being sucked into the vacuum of space, that was a clever interrogation technique. He had to give them credit.

"It's complicated," Brendon said. He sounded so calm, and when Spencer looked at him he knew he was right. Because Brendon was fading, brightening, the edges of his body and face blurring out to match the sudden, blinding light around him. "Just, try to stay calm, okay?" Brendon said. His voice sounded as though it was coming from far away. Spencer could barely make out his features anymore, but his eyes were still there, two dark spots in the brilliant light.

There was something wrong with his legs and arms, too. They felt too heavy, too weak. That would be the drugs, Spencer thought, resigned. He looked down but Ryan wasn't in his arms anymore. Jon wasn't on the floor. There wasn't even a floor to be on. He couldn't hear the burning ship.

Spencer closed his eyes but it didn't do any good. The light was still there, so bright it felt as though he was falling into the heart of a star.


	5. Chapter 5

**v.**

Spencer didn't know how much time passed. He waited for the interrogators to say something, but there was nothing but silence. It was odd, he thought, that he could still feel the ache in his arms and shoulders, the throbbing in his head where the soldiers had struck him when they first boarded, the subsiding burn in his lungs from running around the ship. And when he blinked his eyes he didn't feel blind at all: it just felt as though there was nothing to see except white light.

Eventually, the light began to shift and change. Spencer tensed and waited, but when he finally heard something, it was not the voice of an Alliance interrogator.

 _We are sorry,_ the voices whispered. There were many of them, all around him. _Don't be scared_.

"I'm not frightened," Spencer said. It wasn't entirely a lie. He was scared, but more than that he was curious. He could definitely hear his own voice. That wasn't how sensory deprivation worked. He turned in a slow circle, looking around. He was standing on a surface that wasn't quite solid, and the brightness around him definitely had some shape to it now. He even thought he could hear something: a gentle, rhythmic sound that was familiar but difficult to place. "Where am I?"

 _Don't be scared_ , the whispers said.

Spencer turned quickly. It sounded like they were right behind him, but when he looked he saw only a flicker of motion, a blur in the air, then nothing. They were tall, much taller than him, and seemed to be made more of wisps and air than anything solid. He had never seen anything like them, but he did not feel scared.

There was color in the light now, a bold green seeping out of the white, and he recognized the surface beneath his feet. His heart began to pound and he swallowed nervously. "Where are we? Why did you bring me here?"

The whispers said, _You carry this place._

They almost sounded puzzled, Spencer thought, maybe even apologetic. He wondered if he was going crazy, thinking he could discern the emotions of disembodied voices.

"Yes," he said. "I know it."

He could see the sea clearly now. The water was a brilliant, vibrant green, and the beach was made of sand so dark it was almost black. The waves were gentle, lapping at the shore lazily, and the sky overhead cloudless and blue. There were tufts of grass growing in the sand, and away from the beach the land stretched in lush, rolling hills.

There was only one planet Spencer knew of that had an ocean that color green—or it had, before. The algae in the ocean was probably dead now, along with everything else on the planet.

 _You carry this place_ , the voices said.

Spencer didn't turn that time when he saw the motion from the corner of his eye. He said quietly, "It used to be really beautiful, didn't it?"

The voices hummed mournfully but did not answer.

Ypsilon-X5H had never been a successful colony. It didn't have anything to offer except foul-tasting seaweed and even fouler fish. But it was beautiful and peaceful and people had lived there for centuries, minding their own business. Spencer never learned why the Alliance had taken notice. The official story—which he had always known was a lie, even before the mission—was that rebels from Ypsilon had accidentally unleashed a biological weapon of their own making. The official story was that the Alliance had offered humanitarian aid, and the few survivors who claimed otherwise were lying.

"They told us it was medicine," Spencer said. His eyes were hot and his throat tight. "They told us we were dropping medicine."

They hummed again and moved closer in a swirl of mist and light. It was strangely comforting.

Spencer cleared his throat and wiped his eyes. "Who are you? Where am I really? Where's Ryan? And Brendon?"

 _This is the way we know,_ they said.

"I don't understand."

 _It was silent for so long._

Spencer felt a chill run through him. "Tharsis II. The red planet. You were there? That's your home?"

 _We have moved on, but we remain._

"But how did you—oh. The mass readings. That wasn't the sensors, was it? You _followed_ us?"

 _We listened for the one made of fear and wonder._

"Fear and wonder," Spencer repeated softly. It was as good a way as any to describe Brendon. "But why? What did you do?"

 _It takes less than a moment to step out of time._

"That doesn't answer my question," Spencer grumbled, although he had a feeling he wouldn't understand even if they tried to explain. "We're not on the ship anymore, right? Are you taking us somewhere?"

 _The broken one has asked._

"Ryan? Do you mean Ryan? What did he ask? Can you talk to him like you can to me?"

There was a rustle like a breeze through the grass.

Spencer took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. If they were telling the truth—and he _felt_ like they were, even though he had no reason to trust them, or to trust his own feelings if they were in his mind—then he had to believe that Ryan knew where to go. That Ryan was still alive. Spencer sat down on the warm black sand and drew his legs up, hooked his arms over his knees. "What about Brendon and Jon? Are they okay?"

 _The one who speaks is speaking still_ , they said. Spencer didn't know if he was imagining the trace of amusement in their voices, but he couldn't help but smile. Trust Brendon to make contact with an alien species and promptly talk their ears off. If they even had ears. _The other,_ they went on uncertainly, _he is lost._

"Oh," Spencer said, swallowing around a knot of worry. "They gave him something. It'll wear off eventually. He'll be okay." He dug his fingers into the sand. It felt gritty and damp and not at all like something he'd simply conjured up from his memory. "I hope he'll be okay."

There were no words in their response, only a gentle hum of sound that reminded Spencer of the wind on Tharsis II, soft and dry.

"I suppose you could be part of a hallucination," he said after a bit. "But if this is an interrogation technique, it could really use some work."

 _You are not frightened._

"Should I be?"

 _We are ready._

"Ready? For what?"

Spencer jumped to his feet. The brilliant green of Ypsilon's ocean was already fading away to a paler hue, and the sand beneath his feet was gray instead of black. The sky was washed out and he couldn't hear the waves anymore. Spencer felt a lurch and he fell to his knees, squeezing his eyes shut against the light that was now so bright it was painful. He heard a roaring sound—thousands of whispers, he thought, millions of them—and he felt the presence of something unimaginably massive looming just behind him, something so huge he was afraid to look but he couldn't help himself, he had to _see_ them, finally, so he turned his head—

The white light blinked out, and they were gone.

The air shivered for a moment with a sound so low Spencer felt it rather than heard it, then it was still. He blinked until the spots stopped dancing in front of his eyes.

It was night and he was in a forest. He had only ever seen forests from overhead, treetops forming an impenetrable green cover on a planet below, but there was no mistaking it now. There were two moons in the sky, one white and the other pale blue, together casting enough light for him to see by. It was a clearing but not a natural one: a neat square carved out of tall, spindly trees, artificially level ground carpeted with fallen leaves.

Spencer stood up slowly, shaking off the stiffness and disorientation, and looked around.

Ryan was lying on his back several feet away.

Spencer stumbled over to him. "Ryan." He dropped to his knees. Ryan's eyes were closed and there was still blood on his face, on his clothes and arms and skin, _everywhere_ , but he was still breathing. "Ryan, can you hear me?"

"Is he okay?" Brendon was standing several feet away. He had with him the same things he'd had in the capture bay of the _Nova Gloria_ : the small box Spencer now recognized as Clover's cage, and one of the backpacks from their ship. Jon was lying on the ground, curled onto his side. For a moment the cat's eyes glowed brightly through a hole in the cage. Brendon walked over to Jon—he looked as unsteady as Spencer felt—and crouched beside him, touched his hand to Jon's forehead. Jon didn't react at all, and Brendon looked up, worried. "Do you know what's wrong with him?"

"He can't feel anything," Spencer said. "Or hear or see or _anything_ yet. It'll wear off by itself, but there's nothing we can do about it."

"Oh. Okay." But Brendon didn't move away from him, and he didn't take his hand from Jon's shoulder. "Is Ryan—how is he?"

Ryan's lips moved and he made a small sound, a pained gasp. "Spence," he said. He licked his lips but did not open his eyes. "W'happened?"

"We're okay," Spencer told him, shaky with relief. "We're okay. You're okay. We're not on the ship anymore."

"They rescued us," Brendon said. He sat back on his heels and looked up at the sky. "The aliens. They were there all along. And they brought us here. Wherever here is."

Spencer smoothed the hair back from Ryan's forehead and cupped his face gently. "Ry? Do you know where we are?"

Ryan coughed painfully, and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. "Cold," he said.

"I know," he said. "I'm sorry. We'll get you someplace warm soon, okay?" If there was help nearby, they had to find it soon.

"There's a path," Brendon said suddenly. When Spencer looked up, he was pointing. "Through the trees, see?"

It took Spencer a moment to spot it, but once he did it was obvious. "I see it," he said. He looked around the clearing carefully, but it was the only path he saw. It was almost wide enough to a road. He made a quick decision and said, "I'll follow it and see if I can find help." A road meant there was someone—or something—on this planet. If this clearing was a primitive landing pad, as he suspected it was, a road was a good place to start.

"I can—"

"No." Spencer said it so sharply Brendon flinched like he'd been struck. Spencer exhaled and ran his hand over his face. "I'll go. One of us has to stay here," he explained. "We can't leave them alone."

After a moment, Brendon nodded. "Okay. Okay. Be careful."

Spencer leaned down to kiss Ryan's forehead. "I will," he promised. "I'll be back. If they really meant to help us, they wouldn't have set us down that far from help, would they?"

He didn't expect an answer, and he didn't get one.

It was easy enough to follow the road in the moonlight. It was wide and clear with few roots or rocks to trip over, and in spite of his tiredness Spencer was soon running. There had to be _something_ nearby. There had to be. If there wasn't—no. He wasn't going to consider that, not yet. They had no ship, no supplies, no idea where they were. Their only hope was to find somebody to help.

The forest was dark and strange and more than a little terrifying. Spencer had never been any place like this before—hell, he'd only ever been in controlled gardens and habitats a few times, and never any place with trees as huge as this. He heard unfamiliar sounds from every direction: maybe birds, maybe animals, he had no idea. He didn't even know what lived in the woods outside of stories and myths.

Spencer was gasping for breath by the time the road turned and began to switchback downhill. Here and there were gaps in the trees, and at one wider, open area Spencer stopped to rest and to get some idea of the lay of the land. There were high peaks all around, capped with snow and glistening in the moonlight, and the valley below was narrow and wooded. A river snaked through the bottom of the valley.

There were lights along the river.

It didn't look like much: a small cluster of buildings tucked into the trees, pinpricks of yellow light glowing from windows. Not a spaceport, not a base. Just a village. Spencer thought he could make out flatter, empty areas that might be fields. It was just a quiet mountain village. He started to run again.

He had no idea how much time passed as he ran, and he didn't notice the road was leveling out in the valley bottom until he passed the first field and the animal pen beside it. Spencer stopped so quickly he nearly tripped himself. The creatures stood like massive, dark, shaggy lumps in the shadows, as tall as a man and three times as wide, but if they noticed his presence they didn't seem to care.

They were domesticated, he told himself. Behind a fence. Probably harmless. It was normal to raise animals on the wilder colonies, or so he'd heard.

Past the first field there was a bridge over the river. Spencer didn't run anymore. He wasn't sure he could: his legs already felt ready to give way and his mouth tasted of blood. And the first lights of the village were just ahead.

He was barely a hundred feet past the bridge when somebody stepped out of the trees beside the road and said, "Stop."

Spencer heard the unmistakable sound of an energy weapon powering up and saw the familiar red glow in the person's hands.

"Who are you?" It was a woman.

"I need—" The words caught in Spencer's throat. He closed his mouth and swallowed, and tried to catch his breath.

The woman stepped closer and leveled the weapon at his head. "Who are you?"

"I need help," he said quickly. "We need help. Up, up the mountain, where the road leads, my friends and I—they're hurt, they need—" Spencer broke off as he started coughing. There were other people emerging from the trees behind the woman, and a few more walking along the road. They were all armed.

"Where did you come from?" the woman demanded. "How did you get here?"

"A ship," Spencer said, although he wasn't sure that was quite the right answer. "It's gone now."

"We would have picked up signs of any ship in the atmosphere."

"Please, they need help. They're hurt."

The woman looked at him for a long, quiet moment. Then she jerked her weapon and said over her shoulder, "Search him."

Two people, a man and a woman, came forward. Spencer held his arms out and let them search for weapons. The man had a mechanical arm, and he thought he saw the strange, flat reflection of an artificial eye when the woman turned her head toward the light. When they found no weapons he obediently followed the woman down the road, conscious of the weapons pointed at him from every direction. It took only a few minutes for them to reach the village. There was no gate or wall around it, but there were more armed men and women moving about amongst the buildings.

"Wait here," the woman said. Two people stepped close to Spencer as she walked over to a long, low building. The door opened and yellow light spilled out, and the woman began speaking to somebody who leaned in the doorway. After a minute or two she came back. "Where did you say your ship landed?"

"It didn't land," Spencer said. He started to point, but when they gripped their weapons tighter he dropped his arm to his side. "It left us here. Up the road, there's a flat area. A clearing?"

"How many of you?"

"Four," he said. "Two of them can't walk. They're really badly hurt. That's why I—" He started coughing again, so painfully he doubled over until it passed.

When he stood up again, the woman was still looking at him. "Go and find out if he's telling the truth," she said. She didn't seem to be talking to anybody in particular, but the two guarding Spencer hurried away, and a few others joined them. A moment later Spencer heard the whir of engines and saw two small, wheeled vehicles pulling out from between two buildings. "You," the woman said to Spencer, "inside."

He followed her. He knew it wouldn't do any good to argue, as much as he wanted to climb onto one of those vehicles to go with them. They were going up to the clearing, at least. Brendon would know what to say when they arrived.

The woman led Spencer into one of the buildings. There was nobody in the room, but it was cluttered with crates and boxes piled high. He hesitated in the doorway until the woman nudged him her weapon. She stepped out and shut the door behind her.

Through the door he heard her say, "He won't say how he got here." She sounded more annoyed than anything, and Spencer thought that was probably a good thing. If they were annoyed with him, and if they used a storage room for interrogation, they probably didn't feel threatened.

They left Spencer alone. He tested the door—it was unlocked, but there were two armed guards outside—and searched through the room. He didn't find anything that could be used as a weapon. Eventually he got tired of pacing and sat down on one of the crates.

A man came into the room several minutes later. "Gina says you won't tell her how you got here," he said by way of greeting. He hopped up onto a stack of boxes and kicked his heels against the sides in a dull, fast rhythm. He had dark hair and his skin was marked with tattoos nearly everywhere that was visible. Like a prisoner from a penal planet, or a member of a revolutionary group that wasn't afraid of identification. Spencer knew he was staring, and when he looked up to meet the man's eyes the man smirked knowingly.

"I did tell her," Spencer said. "She didn't believe me."

"There aren't any other settlements on this planet," the man said. He leaned forward, watching Spencer thoughtfully. "And we can detect any ship that comes within five hundred thousand kilometers. So how did you get here? Long distance drop pod?"

"A ship. You can detect it if you know what to look for," he went on, when the man didn't say anything. "It'll be a mass disturbance for about a nanosecond, nothing else."

"How can that—never mind. We'll come back to that. Why are you here?"

"We need help," Spencer said. "My friend, he thought you could help, but he's—he's hurt. He's unconscious. I don't know why he brought us here." The man's expression grew more and more skeptical as Spencer talked, and Spencer couldn't even blame him. It sounded completely outlandish now that he was here, trying to explain it, so tired he could barely sit upright, so worried he wanted to run up the road after the vehicles even though he knew his legs would give out.

"Is he badly hurt? What happened?"

Spencer swallowed hard. He thought of the men and women outside with cybernetic parts. If they were in the right place, he needed to explain. If they weren't—they were still stuck here among strangers with no way off the planet. "We were captured by the Alliance," he said. "They started to—they took the mechanical parts of his arms, and legs, and—and we got away but I don't know how long he can—"

The man jumped down from the stack of boxes. "What's your name, kid?"

"Spencer."

"Not many people can escape after being captured by the Alliance."

"We had help."

"Who?"

"Friends."

The man raised his eyebrows. "What kind of friends?"

"The kind who helped us escape."

"Sure, right. That's easy to believe."

Spencer shrugged. "We don't have any weapons. We don't have a ship. We don't have anything. There's just the four of us. And the cat. We're no threat to you."

"You'd be amazed how many times somebody's said that to me right before trying to kill me."

Spencer looked pointedly at the tattoos on the man's arms. "No," he said. "I don't think I would be."

The man's grin was all teeth. "And your friend who knew how to find us? Who is he?"

"His name is Ryan."

The man's mouth dropped open. "Holy _shit_ ," he said. "Holy shit! You're Ryan's Spencer? Fuck, why didn't you say so? I need, shit, I need to—" The man searched through his pockets until he found a radio. "Hey, Joe, what's your position?"

The reply came over the radio: "Almost at the landing site. Two minutes, maybe."

"When you get there, whatever you do, _don't hurt them_. They're unarmed and they're friendly and they need our help."

"Got it."

"And try not to die of shock when you see who it is." The man clicked the radio off and stuck it in his pocket. "Why didn't you say so? There would've been a lot less pointing guns and stuff if you'd just said so."

"I still don't know who you are," Spencer said. But the man told his people not to hurt them. He was going to help. Spencer gripped the edge of the crate to keep his hands from shaking. "You know Ryan?"

The man smiled and stuck his hand out. "I'm Pete. Pete Wentz."

"Oh." Spencer shook his hand awkwardly. "I thought you were older."

Pete laughed. "It's really fucking weird we've never actually talked before. I swear, every time I talk to Ryan he gives me about fifty 'have to ask Spencer first' or 'gotta see what Spencer says' before he'll agree to anything. What the hell happened to you guys, anyway? You left Zeta Dra and then, poof, nothing. We were expecting a message from you when you got to Eliezer weeks ago."

It felt like months since they'd launched from Zeta Dra with a plan to recon the Zion system. "We ran into trouble," Spencer said. "Eliezer's under blockade now. We jumped right into it."

By the shocked expression on Pete's face, Spencer guessed news of the blockade on Eliezer hadn't reached this planet yet. And that meant either it had just started when they'd jumped in-system in _The World Is A Broken Bone_ \--or it meant the entities who had rescued them could travel a hell of a lot faster than any human ship.

Pete asked Spencer a lot of rapid-fire questions about the blockade and the Alliance's new weapon, the one that made navigation impossible. Most of it Spencer couldn't answer with more than a guess. Eventually Pete said, "I'll be back," and hurried out of the room.

He left the door open, and after a moment Spencer stood up to look out. The armed guards were gone, and nobody seemed to be paying any attention to him. He could leave, he thought, but he didn't have anywhere to go. They were bringing Ryan and Brendon and Jon here, and there was nothing for Spencer to do but wait.

He sat down on the step outside the storeroom and rested his head in his hands.

Footsteps crunched on the ground in front of him. "Are you thirsty?"

Spencer looked up. A pretty red-haired woman was offering him a cup.

"You look like you could use this," she said.

It was water, cool and clean, the kind that had never seen the inside of a ship's recycling system. "Thank you," Spencer said hoarsely.

She smiled. "You ran all the way down the mountain and all you got was Pete shouting questions at you. I'm Ashlee, by the way. It must be really weird for you that we know who you are but you've never met us."

It wasn't weird. It was downright terrifying. Spencer kept telling himself that Ryan knew these people and trusted them—they had saved his life on Nuevo Montenegro when he didn't have anybody else—but it was hard to believe when Ryan wasn't there with him making the introductions.

When Spencer didn't say anything, she sat down beside Spencer on the step and said, "Joe radioed down a few minutes ago. They've got your friends, and they'll be here soon."

"Thank you."

She looked like she was going to say more, but she only patted his arm reassuringly. She didn't leave, though, and Spencer was grateful for her silent company as he waited.

When the vehicles came back into the village, they stopped in front of a building a few doors down. "The infirmary," Ashlee explained. Spencer was already on his feet and running.

The doors to the infirmary opened and bright light shone out. Two people lifted Jon from the flat bed of one vehicle and carried him inside. Pete jumped up onto the back of the other, where Brendon was kneeling beside Ryan.

"Ryan! Is he—"

"The same," Brendon said. "He's still in and out. He kept asking where you were."

"Here," Spencer said. He touched the side of Ryan's face softly. "We're safe here. They're going to help you."

Pete was looking over Ryan's injuries with a grim expression on his face, but his voice was light when he said, "What the hell kind of trouble have you been getting into, Ross?"

Ryan's eyelids fluttered at the sound of his voice. "Told you," he rasped. "Told you I'd—"

"Yeah, I know," Pete said. "You can kill me after we get you put back together, okay?" He waved somebody over to help him, and together they took Ryan into the infirmary. The door slammed shut, cutting off the shaft of light from inside.

Brendon climbed down from the vehicle and stood beside Spencer on the dark road. "Is that true?" Brendon asked quietly. "Are we safe here?" There were still people about, but nobody paid them any mind.

"They know Ryan," Spencer said, well aware that didn't exactly answer the question. He took a few steps, not really intending to go anywhere except out of the middle of the road, but his legs felt suddenly weak and he staggered.

Brendon darted to his side, tucked himself under Spencer's shoulder and hooked an arm around his waist to hold him up. "I hope they're at least friendly enough to give us a place to sleep."

"You should tell them you're an orphan from Aventine."

Spencer felt Brendon go still beside him. "What?"

"When they ask. Tell them you're from Aventine. I know you have a million stories but you should stick to one we all know. That's easiest."

"Spencer." Brendon's voice was low and tense.

Spencer looked up at the sky. The two moons glowed over the jagged mountaintops, and a few bright stars shone between them. He could hear voices from inside the infirmary: loud, strident, determined. But he couldn't understand what they were saying. "I'm probably going to be mad at you later," he said. "I haven't decided yet."

"I—"

For a moment, Spencer thought Brendon was going to apologize. "Don't," he said quickly. "Just... don't."

Brendon exhaled slowly, and he turned to pull Spencer into a tight hug. "You can be angry," he said, his voice muffled against Spencer's chest. "I deserve that."

Spencer put his arms around Brendon and closed his eyes, rested his head against Brendon's hair. They stood there, leaning together, until somebody finally noticed them in the middle of the road and offered to find a place where they could get some rest.

-

Jon woke slowly.

First he was aware of how much his throat hurt, and how it tasted like something had died in his mouth. Then he realized that he felt uncomfortably warm, and there was something sharp pricking his arm. He tried to move it away and winced at the pain that rolled through his shoulder and back, and he let out a sound that was little more than a whimper.

Oh, he thought.

He opened his eyes and struggled to sit up. He was sore all over but nothing held him down. With an annoyed meow, Clover extracted her claws from his forearm and stalked to the foot of the bed. Jon blinked several times and rubbed his eyes. His right arm had a bandage on it but—but elbow, wrist, fingers, thumb, everything he would have sworn had been burnt away to a charred stump, it was all intact.

" _Oh_."

He could see again, feel again, hear again. He was sitting in the middle of a soft bed. The blankets smelled clean and felt a little scratchy to the touch, and the room was warm enough to make him kick the covers off. He was wearing clothes he didn't recognize: a soft shirt and loose pants, both a little too big for him. The walls of the room were made of real wood, or something that looked very similar, and there was a window directly across from him. Sunlight shone through the glass, and outside Jon could see what looked like trees. Real, living trees, like he hadn't seen since he was a kid playing in the conservation parks on Lago.

There were two doors leading from the room, one open and one closed. Jon stood up unsteadily and shuffled over to the open door. The wooden floor was cool and rough on his bare feet. There was a bathroom through the first door, and he turned on the sink to rinse his mouth out and splash cold water over his face.

It felt real. His face was unshaven and stung at the cold water. It _looked_ real. His reflection in the mirror was pale and there were dark circles under his eyes.

Jon turned off the water and left the bathroom. He took a few steps toward the window for a look outside, but he stopped when he heard voices from the other side of the closed door. It wasn't locked, so he pulled it open cautiously.

"Jon!"

He was two steps into the room before Brendon caught him in a hug so forceful it made Jon stagger to the side. Surprised, he went tense, and Brendon let him go almost immediately and stepped back.

"You're awake." Brendon ran his hand through his hair awkwardly. He still had a vivid purple bruise on his face, but otherwise he looked unharmed. "You were—we didn't know—how do you feel?" He met Jon's eyes for a moment then looked away.

"Fine," Jon said. The second room was bigger than the one he'd awoken in: wooden walls, wooden furniture, glass windows, a stone fireplace to one side. There was a man Jon didn't know standing by the fireplace, watching him curiously from underneath the brim of a tattered brown hat, and Ryan and Spencer were sitting on the bed. They all seemed to be waiting for him to say something, so Jon cleared his throat and said, "Actually, I feel like crap. But it's better than... whatever they did."

"They drugged you," Spencer said. He was sitting upright on the bed, his back against the wall, and Ryan was leaning heavily against him. Spencer looked unhurt, but Ryan looked worse than Jon felt. His skin was sickly pale and marked with dark bruises, his hands and arms were wrapped in opaque hermetic bandages and his eyes were closed. Jon thought he might be asleep. Spencer went on, "It's an interrogation technique, take away your senses so they can control—"

"Yeah," Jon interrupted. "I figured that much out." He glanced down at his right hand and flexed his fingers. "Where are we?" He looked at the man beside the fireplace. "Who are you?"

"With friends," Ryan said. His voice was so hoarse it sounded painful and he didn't open his eyes, but Jon was relieved just to know he was awake and well enough to talk. "We're safe here."

"This is Patrick," Brendon said, gesturing at the man by the fireplace. "He's a—a doctor."

Jon heard the slight hesitation before the word, but he nodded. "You did this?" he asked, touching the bandages on his forearms. He couldn't even remember how he'd hurt himself—or how the soldiers had hurt him. He wasn't sure he wanted to remember.

"We couldn't do much more for you," Patrick said. It sounded like an apology. "Mostly we had to wait for the drugs to get out of your system. Are there any lingering effects? Numbness, spots in your vision, trouble hearing? Anything?"

Jon shook his head. "No. I don't think so."

Patrick looked suspicious, but Jon didn't know if that was just his default expression with patients or if he really thought Jon was lying. "Okay. You should probably eat something too, but if you still feel nauseous let me know. And you," he said, pointing at Ryan, "make sure you finish the medicine this time."

Ryan's eyes were still closed, but he seemed to know Patrick was talking to him. "I hate that shit," he grumbled.

"You'll hate being in excruciating pain more," Patrick said. "Drink it or we'll have Spencer pour it down your throat."

"Me? Why do I have to do it?" Spencer asked.

"Because he bites anybody else who tries," Patrick said. "You're the worst patient we've ever had, Ross." But his voice was gentle, and he smiled a little when he added, "Get some rest. We'll give it a couple of days before we go on to the next step."

Sunlight and cool air rushed into the room when Patrick left, then it was gone again as the door shut and there was a minute of uncomfortable silence. Jon looked down and ran his toes along the seams in the wooden floor and felt too aware of the heat of the room, the brush of his clothes against his skin, the headache building behind his eyes, the dozens of questions he wanted to ask.

"Do you remember what happened?" Brendon said, breaking the silence.

Jon hesitated. "Enough," he said after a moment. The pieces were there, sharp and jagged in his mind. He could put them together if he wanted to.

Spencer said, "After we jumped to Eliezer, do you remember—"

"Yeah," Jon said, too loudly. "I do, okay? I remember the whole fucking thing." The room was too hot and too closed and he felt nauseated and dizzy. There was sunlight and fresh air and blue skies outside, and he wanted to be where they wouldn't watch him like they expected him to know what to say. "I'm going—can I—" He gestured at the door, unsure of how to ask. They weren't prisoners, he was fairly sure of that. Ryan had said they were safe.

Spencer only looked confused, but Brendon said, "Oh, yeah, of course. Nobody will bother you. It's hard to get lost. Just stay by the river or road and you'll be fine."

None of them said anything when Jon pushed past him to get outside. Three steps from the door he remembered he wasn't wearing shoes, but the day was warm and the packed dirt felt good beneath his feet, so he didn't go back.

There was a narrow path leading down the hill from the front door. From the outside, Jon could see that the two rooms made up the whole of the small house. There were no other buildings close by, although Jon could see several through the trees. He followed the path slowly, kicking through the fallen leaves and breathing deeply, trying to remember if the forest here smelled the same as the parks on Lago had when he was a kid.

The small house was at the edge of an encampment or village of some sort. On the surface it looked very primitive, but after a few minutes Jon began to see the places where machinery and technology were hidden behind rough wooden façades or buried in the ground. He guessed it could be hidden even better if they needed to—whoever they were. Friends of Ryan's, which meant rebels of some kind, although this was unlike any rebel base Jon had ever seen. The cluster of buildings was surrounded by small fields of crops, and there was a pen of big, shaggy animals placidly eating grass at one end of the village. There were a lot of people about, but aside from a few quick smiles and nods nobody paid any attention to Jon. Quite a few of them, maybe half, had cybernetic body parts they didn't bother to hide at all.

Jon walked through the village and along the road until he reached the river Brendon had mentioned. There was a bridge, but instead of crossing he climbed down the rocky bank to the edge of the water. He found a broad, flat stone to sit on and dangled his bare feet in the water. It was a lot colder than it looked, and after a minute or so he pulled his feet up again to sit cross-legged and watch the water.

Twenty or thirty minutes passed before he heard the footsteps behind him. Jon looked over his shoulder and wasn't surprised to see Brendon picking his way down the riverbank.

"Spencer says we should leave you alone for a while," Brendon said, sitting down beside Jon and bumping him the shoulder and knee. "He says it can be kind of overwhelming when the drugs wear off."

Jon didn't feel overwhelmed now that he was outside in the open air and sunshine; he just felt tired. "This is your way of leaving me alone?"

Brendon shaded his eyes from the sunlight as he looked at Jon. "Spencer's not always right about everything. Do you want me to go?"

"No," Jon said. The sunlight on the water was almost too bright to look at. "It's all right."

"This planet is called East," Brendon said. "Not East anything, just East. I don't know why. Pete acts like there's some big joke behind the name, but he won't say what it is so I think he's making it up. Oh, Pete's, um, I guess he kind of runs this place. He and Patrick do. They know Ryan from a long time ago."

"They're the ones who..." Jon lifted his hand in a nonsense gesture and dropped it to rest on his knee again. "When he was hurt?"

"Yeah."

"And he's letting them do it again?"

Brendon picked up a handful of gravel and started throwing it into the river, pebble by pebble. "He asked them to. I think this time... it's different, this time. He's got a good reason to stay alive. But it's going to take a long time and he—well. He's in pretty terrible shape, and Ryan never likes being so... so helpless. How he is today, you saw him, that's pretty much the most lucid he's been since we got here." At Jon's questioning glance, Brendon said, "Two days ago. You kind of woke up a couple of times, but not really. Spencer says that's normal."

"Spencer knows a lot about it," Jon said.

Brendon threw the last of his pebbles into the river. "Yeah."

They sat in silence for a few minutes.

"I don't know what they told you," Brendon said eventually. His voice was quiet, and he wasn't looking at Jon. "Do you remember?"

Jon thought about saying no, just to see what Brendon would tell him. But he was too tired for games, and he didn't think—he didn't know what he thought, but he didn't think Brendon deserved that. He said, "They told me what Spencer did before he deserted." But that was unfair too, so he added, "What they made him do."

Brendon nodded but said nothing.

Jon closed his eyes for a moment and remembered: sitting on his father's shoulders while the parade passed by, laughing and waving while the people of Lago cheered. He opened his eyes again. The anger was still there, coiled cold and tight in his gut, but memory was distant, difficult to grasp. He cleared his throat and said, "And they told me that you're apparently the long lost son of the family that's the most well-known and powerful and—"

"Feared," said Brendon, when Jon hesitated. "Hated. More than anyone else in the galaxy."

"With good reason."

"I know," Brendon said. He was watching Jon with wide, serious eyes. "Jon, I know you probably don't trust me right now, but believe me when I say I know that better than anyone."

Jon unfolded his legs and stretched his toes down to touch the cold water again. "You said you left Eden—"

"It was true, what I told you," Brendon said. He let out a long, slow breath and ran his hand through his hair. "It just wasn't the whole story."

"It's okay," Jon said, suddenly afraid of what Brendon might say. "You don't have to tell me."

"I think I do," Brendon said. "Spencer and Ryan too. But not—would later be okay? It's just that I..." Brendon trailed off and looked down, his hands folded in his lap, his hair hanging over his face. "I will tell you," he said quietly.

"Later," Jon said. "Later's fine." Whatever memory it was that made Brendon curl in on himself like that, scared and small, Jon didn't want to bring it into this place, with the sunlight on the water and warmth on his shoulders and Brendon's knee pressing against his. He leaned over to pick up a handful of small rocks and started plunking them into the water one after another. "I'm still a little fuzzy on how we got here."

"You heard them, didn't you?"

Jon didn't have to ask who Brendon meant. "I think so. There was—when the soldiers were interrogating me, there was something else. It told me not to be scared. And it kept saying that, but it—I kind of had a hard time listening." Brendon was nodding, so Jon asked, "You knew they were there, didn't you? Even before we were captured."

"I didn't know," Brendon said. "I just thought—I don't know. I had a feeling, like something was watching us the whole time we were in the tunnels, and again after we left. But I wasn't really sure until we were on the Alliance ship and I was—" He shook his head and laughed humorlessly. "I was trying to pull rank on the captain, but that wasn't exactly working. It's a good thing they decided to show up when they did."

"Why did they help us?"

Brendon shrugged. "Maybe they were curious. Or maybe they were bored. I don't know. I talked to them some when they were bringing us here, but they didn't explain anything."

"What did you talk about?" Jon asked, curious.

"Oh. Um." Brendon wrinkled his nose. "You, mostly. They were worried that they couldn't talk to you like they could to us and—"

"Wait, what?" Jon asked, twisting to look directly at Brendon. "You made first contact with an alien race and had a conversation with them when they rescued us from the Alliance and you talked about _me_?"

"I told you, they were worried."

Jon made a skeptical face. "They were?"

Brendon smiled, and Jon looked away quickly.

"So," he said, rubbing the palm of his hand over the smooth rock, "what happens now?"

"I guess it depends," Brendon said. "Ryan won't be able to leave here for a while. A couple of months, maybe, if Pete stops trying to give him experimental modifications and Ryan stops being so stubborn he sends himself into shock with every procedure."

"Experimental modifications?" Jon said. "Like what? Lasers shooting out of his fingertips?"

Brendon let out a surprised bark of laughter, and Jon felt some of the remaining tension in his back and neck begin to unknot. "Don't mention that to Pete when you meet him," Brendon said, grinning. "He'll think it's an amazing idea."

"It is an amazing idea." Jon leaned back on his hands and looked up. There were clouds gathering over the mountains, dark and ominous against the brilliant blue sky. "So you'll be here for a couple of months?"

"We thought..." Brendon began, a hint of confusion in his voice. "Spencer was going to ask you to stay on with us after we got to Leviathan. Didn't he say?"

Jon turned to look at Brendon. "No. He didn't."

"Well, he was. I mean, we all agreed, but I guess he just hadn't got around to talking to you yet. And we don't have a ship now, obviously, but we will again. Spencer and Ryan hate to stay in one place for too long and I _can't_ , it's not safe for—for me to stay put anywhere, and we thought you might... that is, if you wanted..."

"But you guys barely know me."

Brendon gave him an amused look. "We know you pretty well by now."

Jon frowned but said nothing.

"Everybody has secrets, Jon. You can keep yours. But—look, you already know the worst about us. The most dangerous. Whatever secrets you're carrying around, are they worse than ours? Worse than _mine_?"

"That would be difficult," Jon said thoughtfully. "Unless I'm secretly the traitorous cyborg bastard son of one of the Alliance's admirals or something."

"Are you?" Brendon's eyes were dancing.

Jon smiled crookedly. "Nope. I'm just another refugee slum kid."

"We'd like you to stay with us, if you want." Brendon's expression turned earnest. "We'll get you another ship to play with eventually. But if you don't want to, that's okay, it's fine, we'll arrange—"

"There's no way I'm letting Spencer steal another ship by himself," Jon said. "He'll pick the worst one in the port. Somebody has to make sure he steals a good one next time."

Brendon laughed, so bright and so alive Jon was leaning closer without thinking about it. Brendon looked at him and began, "Jon? What—"

Jon pressed his lips to Brendon's. His heart skipped a beat at the startled noise Brendon made. He touched Jon's shoulder, and when Jon moved away Brendon ducked his head forward to kiss Jon again, softly.

Then he looked away, still smiling, and hooked his arm around Jon's shoulders in a half-hug. "I'm sure he'll appreciate the help," he said.

There was a cool wind picking up, carrying the clouds over the mountains and raising goosebumps on his skin in spite of the sun. Jon shivered, and Brendon squeezed him lightly.

"Patrick says there's a storm coming," Brendon said, his voice low and close to Jon's ear.

Jon wondered if the storms on East would be anything like the ones on Pacifica IV: violent and ugly, thick with corrosive, foul-smelling rain and howling winds, and days spent cower in the warrens of the undercity. It was almost impossible to imagine weather like that here with the trees and mountains and river water as clear as glass.

"We never gave them a name," he said. "Those creatures we saw singing out there. We didn't name them."

"We will," Brendon said quietly. He cleared his throat and said, a bit louder, "Patrick also says I'm supposed to make sure you eat something. They have real food here, you know, from real plants that grew from the ground and everything."

Jon leaned closer and rested his head on Brendon's shoulder, grateful for the warmth and the touch.

"In a little bit," he said. He wasn't ready to go inside just yet.


End file.
